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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 



BOOKS BY PROFESSOR WENDELL 

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBWER'S SONS 



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THE 
PRIVILEGED CLASSES 



BY 

BARRETT WENDELL 



'Some said, 'John, print it'; others said, 'Not so;' 
Some said, 'It might do good'; others said, 'No.' 

— BUNYAN. 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1908 



wo Cooies rtecuivdt' 

OCT 2 ^^^^ 

.■..• Q^ •■.Ac. ;x; ,. 



.V/7?7 



Copyright, 1908, bt 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

Published October, 1908 



T) 



.^ 



9 



X 




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NOTE 

In 1904 I was invited to give the 
Commencement address at Haverford 
College. This address, subsequently 
published in the ** North American Re- 
view," under the title of "Our National 
Superstition," was kindly received, 
though not without dissent. A simi- 
lar reception, wherein more dissent 
was apparent, met an address on *'The 
Privileged Classes " which I gave 
before the Twentieth Century Club, of 
Chicago, in January, 1908, and which 
appeared, a few days later, in the 
"Boston Transcript." It has seemed 
worth while to put these papers in 
more nearly permanent form, and to 
add to them two others, here published 
for the first time, which at once indi- 
cate how the earlier written are related 



NOTE 

and somewhat develop the suggestions 
impHed in them. Together the four 
make a consecutive book. Though 
for thorough treatment such matters 
as are thus brought to mind demand 
the full authority of expert training, 
they are perhaps of enough general 
interest to warrant occasional discus- 
sion by one who can pretend to no 
more authoritative character than that 
of a man of letters. 

B. W. 



Nahant, Massachusetts, 
28 July, 1908. 



CONTENTS 
I 

Page 

The Privileged Classes .... 3 

II 

The American Revolution . , , . 55 

III 

Our National Superstition . . . 133 

IV 

Op Education 181 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 



An address given before the Twentieth Century Club, ol 
Chicago, in January, 1908, and subsequently printed in the 
Boston Evening Transcript. 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

It is the privilege of a man of letters 
that he may venture on occasion to 
discuss matters in which he makes no 
pretence to be expert. Such utterances 
claim no authority; they are worth 
exactly as much respect or neglect as 
their common sense may happen to 
command. The very fact, however, 
that their whole justification lies in 
their common sense — that is, in the 
degree to which they express such opin- 
ions as would generally arise in rational 
but inexpert minds, confronted with 
problems — gives them occasional value. 
If they prove on the whole true, they 
help us to see the truth somewhat more 

[3] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

distinctly than might otherwise be the 
case. If false, they do little harm; in- 
deed, they may even then do a shade of 
good by demonstrating the man of let- 
ters who utters them to be without 
the common sense on which he has 
endeavoured to rely, and therefore to 
be negligible unless he have the hap- 
piness to be amusing. 

Some such considerations as these 
have emboldened me, a man of letters 
who has been pondering of late both in 
America and in France, to define, for 
myself and for whoever cares to follow 
my line of thought, certain opinions 
concerning social tendencies forced on 
my attention in both countries. For 
amid the many and wide differences of 
temper which distinguish our elderly 
American republic from the youthful 
republic across the Atlantic, there is 
one popular impulse in which the two 
[4] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

agree. The sentiment of the United 
States and of contemporary France is 
deeply at one in its condemnation of 
political or social privilege. No ag- 
gressions are more honestly detestable 
to either than those of a privileged 
class. 

Just what we mean by a privileged 
class may not be quite easy to define. 
The term, however, evokes in our 
minds a traditionally familiar, though 
rather nebulous, image of a body of 
people permitted by custom, and often 
by positive law as well, not only to 
enjoy immunities of various kinds from 
the political and social burdens borne 
by the generality of their compatriots, 
but also to possess opportunities for 
various agreeable careers from which 
unprivileged mortals are debarred. 
In just such discussions as ours we 
may permit ourselves freedom from 
[5] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

scientific exactitude of phrase. For 
our present purposes, it is enough if 
we may agree that the type of a privi- 
leged class, as conceived nowadays, is 
the kind of human being whom we pop- 
ularly suppose to have been incarnate 
in the nobility and the clergy of France 
before the French Revolution. Gargan- 
tuan we may call its portentous aspect, 
if we remember the grotesquely colossal 
figure familiar for three centuries and 
more in the undying work of Rabelais. 
A more modern expression of the same 
opinion is almost as familiar in the 
tirade of Figaro, detailing, at a mo- 
ment when the American Revolution 
was a reality and the French Revolu- 
tion close at hand, how the privileged 
classes who have blocked his way right 
and left have done nothing to warrant 
their pretensions beyond taking the 
trouble to be born. 

[6] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Already we can begin to feel, as good 
Americans, how and why they were de- 
testable — those privileged classes of an 
elder time swept out of existence by the 
Revolution. They pretended to inherent 
superiority, which they would not put 
freely to the test of competition. They 
seized on more than their share of the 
good things of this world. Secure from 
wholesome rivalry, they did very neg- 
ligently what work of one kind or an- 
other they still did at all. To no 
small degree, they drew their support 
from public funds, the product of 
taxation in various forms. Generally 
free from direct taxation, they were 
cynically or at best irresponsibly indif- 
ferent to the increasing burden of tax- 
ation which their slothful extravagance 
imposed on others than themselves. 
One might go on indefinitely, adding 
unwinsome traits to the picture of 
[7] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the dreadful things which used to 
exist. That it is photographically 
true, historically indisputable, we need 
not pretend. That it is substantially 
faithful to what countless millions of 
humanity have honestly believed, both 
in the days of privilege and in the hap- 
pier days which have ensued, nobody, 
I think, will deny. And the hatefulness 
of a privileged class, among ourselves 
and among our fellow Republicans of 
modern France, — throughout our auro- 
rally enlightened modern world, one 
might better say, — may be summed up 
in our common condemnation of any 
human being who takes on earth, by 
sheer force, more room than he has 
honestly earned here. 

The abiding faith which gives life to 

enduring democracy is of another stripe 

than that which ever made privileged 

classes possible. Where any man is 

[8] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

born democracy never cares to inquire. 
Its one eager demand is that, so far as 
may be here below, every man shall 
have his deserts — that careers shall be 
open to talent, and that no artificial de- 
vices shall either block its progress, or 
keep incapacity in positions of author- 
ity. That this ideal end can never be 
quite attained in no wise impairs the 
inspiring vitality of its ideal. Any fact, 
any tendency which seems to favour 
it, we eagerly welcome. Any which 
threatens to obstruct it we distrust and 
condemn. Some such menace of ob- 
struction has appeared, to recent ap- 
prehension, in various aspects of wealth 
and of fashion. Without a conscious 
tinge of envy, hatred, or malice, — with 
consciences serenely void of unchari- 
table offense, — innumerable good peo- 
ple everywhere hold them threatening 
to human progress; and nowhere more 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

than in the United States. A glance at 
any of the more popular newspapers, 
daily or weekly, which form the staple 
of literature for contemporary America, 
will demonstrate our national sentiment 
concerning these matters. Take a half- 
hour's journey anywhere, in electric 
cars or by railway. If our pervasive de- 
testation of privilege have not been 
presented to your eyes by more than 
one Gargantuan image in modern guise, 
you may rest content that you have 
been preserved from the ugly apparition 
only by miracle. Hardly a day passes 
without some new caricature, published 
by the thousand, of a big-bellied, whis- 
kered, bejewelled, grinning monster, 
complacently or cynically thrusting his 
lesser fellow-creatures out of his over- 
grown way. Gargantuan, Pharaonic, 
vulgar, these monstrous incarnations of 
contemporary wealth are as familiar to 
[ 10] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the eyes of American children nowa- 
days as the Lord's Prayer ever was to 
the lips of Puritan infancy in old New 
England. 

If you begin to ponder on this un- 
lovely image, however, you will grow 
aware that it meets your eyes only in 
the transitory, recurrent pages of our 
popular journals. In actual life you 
will look for it in vain. No such crea- 
ture as it represents ever actually bur- 
dened our American earth with its 
ponderous flesh and blood; rather it 
is a contemporary troll, or giant, or 
ogre. Fantastic monsters we know 
that these were — nightmares and bug- 
bears, not realities. Something like 
them, we may presently begin to sur- 
mise, is all that these unalluring idols 
in modern guise actually amount to. 
No one would seriously pretend that 
complete equality can anywhere be 
[11] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

discerned in the course of nature — in- 
animate, brute, or human. No one 
would soberly deny, for example, that 
some human beings are more beautiful 
than others, some stronger, some more 
intelligent, some more gifted with the 
power of singing or of playing on the 
piano, some with that of controlling 
politics or of administering the law, 
some with the faculty of directing their 
economic energies to fruitful ends — in 
other words, the faculty of making 
money. What everybody would deny 
is that any such superiority or advan- 
tage of nature may justly demand more 
physical room in this world than a 
single American citizen is fairly entitled 
to by the mere fact of his existence. 

For a good while, accordingly, I was 
accustomed, as a man of letters, to re- 
gard the Gargantuan images of the 
daily prints — at least in their outward 
[12] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

and visible aspect — as sheer figments of 
the imagination. By-and-by, however, 
an every-day incident in electric cars 
began to force on my notice the indis- 
putable fact that we are frequently 
exposed to a physical experience gro- 
tesquely like that inflicted on unimpor- 
tant fellow-creatures by the big-bellied 
monsters of caricature. Electric cars 
are provided with only a limited num- 
ber of seats, to one of which, so lonof as 
any remains unoccupied, the payment 
of your fare is supposed to entitle you. 
Again and again, after worthy citizens 
have duly paid their fares, I have ob- 
served them, particularly of a late after- 
noon, compelled to stand up, not be- 
cause all the seats were actually taken, 
but because the greater part of their 
seated fellow-passengers insisted in sit- 
ting with the legs at right angles, 
thereby occupying two places instead 
[ 13] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

of one. If asked to move, these en- 
throned beings resented the request in 
a manner so surly that a man of peace- 
able disposition soon gave up the prac- 
tice of making it. In our daily envi- 
ronment, it appeared, there actually 
existed a variety of fellow-creature who 
habitually demanded more room than 
he had paid for, or than the mere fact 
of his earthly existence could demon- 
strate him to deserve. What made his 
aspect grotesque, meanwhile, was the 
fact that between his widely parted 
knees you could generally discern a 
tin dinner-pail. In other words, if 
you began to look for a flesh-and- 
blood personage who should gruffly 
exemplify in daily life the phenomenon 
apparently monstrous in daily carica- 
ture — the insistence on forcibly seizing 
more room than he had any right to — 
you might find him regularly, at five or 
[14] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

six o'clock, by hailing any electric car 
which happened to be taken at the 
same time by honest labouring men, on 
their way home from work. 

So far, all was innocent enough. It 
was a good while before these sturdy, 
seated personages, compelling other 
folks to stand up while they occupied 
two seats at once, impressed me in 
any other light than half-annoying and 
half-comical — the comical phase of the 
matter, of course, lying in the fact that 
this pretension to physical privilege 
was regularly made by people whom 
nobody had ever dreamt of as privi- 
leged. One day, however, I happened 
to sketch the line of thought we have 
been following, in casual talk with 
certain friends whose sympathies are 
supposed — by themselves at all events 
— to be more advanced than mine. 
It had not occurred to me that they 
[15] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

would take what I said as anything 
but whimsical — mildly, unimportantly 
diverting. Much to my surprise, they 
took it seriously. The workingman, 
they informed me, had as good a right 
to existence as I or as anyone else 
— a proposition which I should be 
the last to deny or to question. His 
day's work tired him, they went on; 
why was he not entitled to what little 
comfort the spreading of his legs at 
right angles in a street car might give 
him ? He was, one naturally answered, 
unless the room required by the posture 
were needed by fellow passengers who, 
after their own day's work — of other kind 
than his, perhaps, but not necessarily 
more exhilarating — were probably as 
tired as he. All they demanded was fair 
play — rights precisely equal with his. 

Offhand, this demand does not seem 
excessive. To sundry philanthropic 
[ 16] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

friends of mine, on the other hand, it has 
more than once presented itself as un- 
sympathetic, aggressive, and graspingly 
selfish. In other words, I have reluc- 
tantly begun to feel, a workingman who 
claims for himself in a street car more 
room than he will grant a fellow passen- 
ger, is really, however little he thinks 
so, a privileged individual. Nobody, 
I fear, can deny that a good deal of 
highly respectable public opinion al- 
lows him — unresisted, and sympathet- 
ically approved — to do sundry aggres- 
sive things which, if done by anyone 
else, that same public opinion would 
heartily condemn. At least there is one 
daily aspect in which, for all his exter- 
nal dissimilarity, he uncomfortably re- 
sembles the plutocrats of American 
caricature, and the aristocrats — lay and 
clerical — of traditional pre-revolution- 
ary France. 

[ 17] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Such a consideration can hardly help 
setting your man of letters to wonder- 
ing whether an honest labourer resem- 
bles these true or imaginary privileged 
classes in any other ways. The sug- 
gestion that he can fairly be described 
as privileged, must doubtless seem pre- 
posterous. He is the free fellow-citi- 
zen of us all, and as such he is entitled 
to just the degree of respect due to 
anybody else, neither more nor less. 
His vote is exactly as good as yours or 
mine, neither worse nor better. No one 
would dream of questioning these com- 
monplaces — none the less vital be- 
cause they are so superbly at the base of 
our American national convictions. But 
the very fact that he is described — that 
he describes himself, indeed, — as a 
workingman or a labourer, implies that 
there are certain differences which dis- 
tinguish him from people of other eco- 
[ 18] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

nomic or social classes. Of these differ- 
ences two seem fairly obvious : circum- 
stances have prevented him, as a rule, 
from acquiring enough property to be 
an object of direct taxation; and the 
same circumstances or analogous ones 
have made him, as a type, more nu- 
merous than his equal fellow-citizens, 
who, so far as economic success goes, 
have chanced to be more fortunate. 
Simple as these statements seem, they 
involve at least one rather important 
consequence. Your workingman, by 
reason of the circumstances which dis- 
tinguish him from other people, is in a 
position where he can exercise a good 
deal of control over the proceeds of 
property not his own. It is quite 
within the facts to remind ourselves 
that there are American cities where the 
voters outnumber the direct taxpayers 
in a proportion of five to one ; and that, 
[ 19] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

at the same time, we have not a single 
city where the levying and the expendi- 
ture of taxation does not rest, in ulti- 
mate analysis, on a majority vote. In- 
creased taxes, no doubt, fall indirectly 
on all citizens; if a landlord's tax be 
raised, he must raise his rents or face 
his creditors. Such remote considera- 
tions, however, are beyond the horizon 
of most tenants, who denounce every in- 
crease of rent as a new manifestation 
of grasping monopoly. We have riots 
about such incidents now and then; 
and if any municipality should try to 
cure the trouble by putting ever so 
small a direct tax on workingmen we 
should have worse ones. Your Ameri- 
can voter's belief that the control of 
public moneys should lie with him is 
doubtless wholesome ; whether his indif- 
ference to the duty of contributing his 
due proportion of these public moneys 
[20 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

be equally so, we need not at present in- 
quire. That it exists, we cannot deny. 
Nor can we deny that, in the course of 
the last century or so, one great maxim 
of the American Revolution seems to 
have got queerly turned round. Our 
forefathers protested against taxation 
without representation; our fellow- 
citizens now demand, as their natural 
right, something very like representa- 
tion without taxation. 

This looks uncommonly like a phase 
of old-fashioned privilege. What is 
more, it brings us straight to something 
very like another. Whoever has had 
patience to follow these considerations 
can hardly avoid assent to a proposition 
which may very likely have suggested 
itself already. There was no need that 
the writer of such opinions should have 
taken the trouble to protest himself 
nothing but a man of letters. You may 
[21 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

insist, if you will, that he is a free citizen 
of a free country. You must admit at 
the same time that he has expressed 
views which would preclude the possi- 
bility of his ever taking part in its free 
public life, or even of much influencing 
its acknowledged public opinion. It is 
far from my intention, at this moment, 
to make any criticism on the public 
utterances of others, more immediately 
serviceable to the republic than any 
mere man of letters can ever be. No 
one could be further than I from doubt- 
ing the fundamental honesty of our true 
public men. No one could imagine 
such considerations as have here arisen 
in my mind to be completely compre- 
hensive of our present political and 
social condition. No one can honestly 
question the sincerity with which our 
national leaders protest their faith in 
American democracy and in the Amer- 
[22] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ican people. And yet, I believe, no one 
can deny that such protestations are as 
crucial as open professions of creed 
ever were when differences of religion 
have waxed high. For a public man to 
hesitate in making them would bring his 
period of public usefulness to an abrupt 
end. To millions of our voters, the sort 
of thing which I have already permitted 
myself to say would unquestionably pre- 
sent itself almost exactly as refusal to 
sacrifice to the image of Csesar pre- 
sented itself to loyal Romans of the 
empire, as refusal to bow at the men- 
tion of the name of the Mikado is said 
to have presented itself in old Japan, 
as neglect to rise and bare your head 
when the band plays "God Save the 
King" presents itself to British sub- 
jects gathered together, or as Use majeste 
presents itself to German magistrates 
under the Emperor William. Who- 
[23] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ever your sovereign be — one, or few, or 
many — he demands for his favour, just 
as he has demanded throughout history, 
the tribute of formal and if so may be, 
of wiUing and sincere homage. Hom- 
age is his privilege, and to preserve priv- 
ilege you must jealously guard it. So 
your American voter, typified for the 
moment by your honest workingman, 
taking two seats in a public conveyance 
where he has paid for only one, re- 
quires as the first condition of his suf- 
frage uncritical — and happily sincere- 
protestation of loyalty to him. Who- 
ever fails to make it commits the indis- 
creet, unpardonable sin of failure to 
acknowledge a privilege which, in many 
aspects, must remain dominant. 

The sin once committed, however, 
one has the consolation of freedom from 
dread. One may go on to ask some- 
thing further concerning the character- 
[24] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

istics manifested by this sovereign kind 
of people, whose vote controls the vote 
of others by overwhelming majority, 
who are exempt by the fortune of lack 
of fortune from all the discomfort of 
direct taxation, and who demand for 
the reward of their smiles the protesta- 
tion of unhesitating and enthusiastic 
loyalty. The phases of privilege thus 
in their enjoyment are so far from 
evil as not even to be objectionable; 
they do not needfully involve either 
of the two most deplorable character- 
istics perceptible in the old-world privi- 
lege of pre-Revolutionary days — in- 
difference to duty, and selfish tyranny. 
The old privileged classes, we have 
agreed, were cynically extravagant with 
public property, particularly when they 
had the good fortune to be in public 
employ. They combined together to 
keep up excessive prices, and to prevent 

r 25 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

competition with themselves. They 
were careless, throughout, of the quality 
of their work, and of its quantity. And 
when their sloth, or their luxury, or 
their extravagance compelled, for their 
support, increased demand on the 
sources of public income, they were 
careful that the added weight of taxa- 
tion should fall on others than their 
privileged selves. One might go on 
indefinitely, defining the portentous 
traditional image of privilege in the 
olden time. The real question is 
whether the privilege of these later 
times is beginning to display any simi- 
lar characteristics. 

Take the question of public moneys. 
An every-day example will here serve 
our purpose better than generalization; 
and the pavement of a street is as good 
an example as any. I have one in 
mind, made almost under my eyes not 
[26] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

long ago, and on the whole well made. 
It involved the ploughing up of an old 
pavement, the rolling of stone and 
gravel into the new surface, and the 
incidental handling of this material, 
brought in carts, and mostly spread 
with shovels. Just how long it ought 
to have taken I do not know, for want 
of expert knowledge. Just how long it 
took I do not remember; but a single 
block was a matter of from two to three 
weeks. One thing is certain. Neither 
the plough nor the steam-roller was 
actually at work during anything like 
half the time when it was supposed to 
be; and, day after day, the periods of 
inaction were devoted by the men in 
charge of these engines to friendly con- 
versation. With the men whose duty 
was shovelling, the case was the same. 
There were at least twice as many of 
them as there was any need of; and, 
[27] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

although I glanced at them at intervals 
throughout their labours, from a window 
where I was at work, I never observed 
any one of them use a shovel twice with- 
out a good long rest between the shovel- 
fuls. These moments of relaxation 
appeared to be full of social charm. A 
shovel once empty, the wielder of it 
would rest it on the ground, and leaning 
on it as a staff, would exchange observa- 
tions or anecdotes with his similarly un- 
occupied neighbour. Had one desired 
an image of a leisure class, as a privi- 
leged class is often called, one would 
have needed only a kodak at almost 
any moment during the whole deliber- 
ate job. These were voters of our pub- 
lic moneys, out of other people's pock- 
ets into their own. 

If this incident had been exceptional, 
— except for the fact that the pavement, 
finally made, proved tolerably sound, 
[28] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

— it would not have been worth men- 
tion. The significant phase of it is its 
complete commonplace. Watch pub- 
lic work anywhere in this country, and 
you will find it to the eye only faintly 
distinguishable from deliberate idling. 
Here, at least, is one aspect where the 
new privileged class reveals itself as 
subject to an insidious temptation of 
privilege in elder times. 

In other respects something of the 
same kind is observable. Take, for ex- 
ample, the quality of the work which 
nowadays Americans may generally 
expect from people who profess to do 
it. Tear your trousers hereabouts, and 
try to get them mended in such manner 
as has hitherto been done almost any- 
where abroad. If the mending in Amer- 
ica can ever be made to look better 
than a patch your experience will be 
happier than most of us have had; 
[29] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

yet your American tailor enjoys wages 
which make foreign tailors open their 
eyes. Again, a friend of mine posses- 
ses a travelling bag with a slightly 
complicated lock. A year or two ago 
he took it to an American city of 
some ten or twelve thousand inhabi- 
tants, and on his arrival discovered that 
he had forgotten the key. No lock- 
smith to be found in that region could 
offer to open it by any less drastic means 
than cutting out the lock with a chisel. 
My friend recoiled at this suggestion, 
borrowed night clothes, and sent for 
his key by mail. A few months after- 
wards the same misadventure befell 
him, with the same bag, in a German 
village. A young mechanic, who picked 
the lock in five minutes, made a new 
key in half an hour or so. The wages 
of this ingenious craftsman, I am given 
to understand, were not more than a 

[30] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

quarter of those of an American lock- 
smith. One might go on indefinitely 
with such examples, sure to be within 
anyone's experience, of work worse and 
worse done and better and better paid 
for. The single point of professional 
skill and pride insisted on among our- 
selves at this moment appears to be 
that your workingman's wages shall be 
kept high. The quantity and the qual- 
ity of what work he does seem equally 
negligible. Again, we find ourselves 
confronted with something uncommonly 
like a characteristic foible of old-world 
privilege. 

Another follows hard on its heels. 
Not only among ourselves but all over 
our modern, democratic world, work- 
ingmen combine, more and more, not 
only to limit the hours and the quantity 
of their work, but so far as possible, to 
exclude all competition with their asso- 
[31] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ciated selves. The question of labour 
unions is too extensive, too technical, — 
too serious, I have been warned by par- 
tisans on both sides, — for any adequate 
consideration by a man of letters. Yet 
even a man of letters has a right to ex- 
press such opinions as these : So far as 
combinations of labour tend to improve 
morals in the widest sense, and to in- 
sure their members against the suffer- 
ings incident to accident or misfortune, 
we may cheerfully welcome them as 
beneficent. So far as they confuse the 
distinction between good work and bad, 
or compel a man who can lay a thou- 
sand bricks a day to stop when he has 
laid five hundred, they are demoraliz- 
ing;. So far as their threats or their vio- 
lence restrain from work, which they 
themselves refuse to do, free fellow- 
citizens who are willing and able to do 
it, they are abominable. There comes 
[32] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

to mind an instance told me not long 
ago by a friend who had a good many 
union workmen in his employ. It 
chanced that none among them could 
perform a given piece of work requiring 
special skill. My friend did not ven- 
ture on the bold proposal that a compe- 
tent non-union man might be called in. 
That, he knew, would involve a strike. 
He went so far as to suggest, however, 
that one of two or three union work- 
men, out of a job in a neighbouring city, 
might be sent for. He presently found 
that this, too, was out of the question. 
The introduction even of a union work- 
man as a competitor, from a few hours' 
distance, would have meant a strike as 
well. So the sorely needed work had 
either to go undone or to be done badly ; 
though meanwhile union workmen, ad- 
mittedly competent to do it, were idle 
not a day's journey away. The work- 
[33] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

men concerned in this incident are 
understood to repudiate the terms mo- 
nopoly and privilege. By what others 
they could so properly describe their 
almost realized ideals, no one has yet 
pointed out. 

Similar instances will occur to any- 
body. Of late some of them have been 
brought to public notice by discussions 
concerning the loss of efficiency, of 
earnings, of life, and of limb remarked 
in the recent history of certain railways. 
A competent authority has attributed 
this to the "intense consideration by 
employees of their rights, to the exclu- 
sion of their duties . ' ' Though the phrase 
is hardly epigrammatic, no epigram 
could much more clearly define one 
insidious aspect of class privilege. 

Organized labour, too, is beginning 
to affect international as well as 
domestic politics. Its combinations 
[34] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

against foreign competition, not only 
in America, but also, to go no further, 
in various parts of the British domin- 
ions, are at this moment a common- 
place. Again we touch on matters far 
too extensive for adequate discussion 
here and now. Yet, as was the case 
before, we can fairly remind ourselves 
of certain more or less prevalent opin- 
ions. There can be little doubt, for one 
thing, that the labour question is among 
the chief causes which are so often as- 
sumed to be propelling the United States 
towards serious difficulty — or at least 
towards the possibility of serious difficulty 
— with Japan. And a few months ago 
there were not wanting critics of intel- 
ligence, both here and abroad, who sur- 
mised that occasion might not have 
arisen for despatching the American 
fleet through the Straits of Magellan un- 
less local combinations of labour on the 
[35] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Pacific Slope had so conducted them- 
selves concerning the maintenance of 
generally excessive wages— higher wages, 
I mean, than could persist against skilful 
competition in one limited section of 
any country — as to involve the cheer- 
fully minimized danger of a war com- 
pared with which the wars of the past 
seem trivial; for none yet has been on 
a planetary scale. It needs, perhaps, 
the vagrant fancy of a man of letters 
to remember those thrilling chapters 
of Dumas where England and France 
almost come to blows because the 
Duke of Buckingham has collected, 
among other love-tokens, the ring of 
Anne of Austria. Privilege is protean 
through the centuries; but privilege 
stays privilege, neglectful of interests 
other than its own. 

It turns the tables, too. Tradition- 
ally, if I remember aright some youth- 
r 36 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ful studies of the law, there was an un- 
just rule that a servant or an employee 
injured in the course of his service 
through no fault of his own, but even 
by negligence or fault on the part of his 
employer, could not recover damages 
from the man who employed him. 
Clearly, anyone not superstitiously de- 
voted to time-honoured legal precedent 
would hold this deplorable. If an em- 
ployer be guilty of negligence or of 
fault it seems monstrous that the mere 
fact of his being an employer should 
shield him from the consequences. 
Here is a clear case of privilege abhor- 
rent to all modern temper. Unless I am 
quite mistaken, however, the legislation 
of the present time is not content with 
the abolition of this old privilege. There 
is a tendency at this moment, all over 
the world, to set the whole thing 
topsy-turvy; there seems to be some- 
[37] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

thing like an endeavour to establish for 
every employee the new privilege that, 
no matter how careless he may be, 
drunk or sober, he shall recover dam- 
ages from a wholly innocent em- 
ployer in whose service anything disas- 
trous happens to him. I remember a 
farce on this point, played a year or 
two ago at the Theatre Antoine, in 
Paris. A drunken fellow became so 
troublesome that his employer paid 
him in full and discharged him about 
half an hour before his term of employ- 
ment was technically at an end. With 
his pocket full, he started, according to 
his own admission, in quest of a stout 
woman whom he had met on the twen- 
tieth of the preceding May. On his 
way he was run over by an omnibus. 
Thereupon he brought action against 
his employer for full wages, and hospi- 
tal expenses, during the ensuing weeks 
[38] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

when he was laid up. And in the farce 
the fellow won his case; and the em- 
ployer was lectured by the judge for 
the gross inhumanity of the motives 
which led him to contest it, and for pet- 
tifogging technicality when in final des- 
peration he suggested that, if his own 
watch was right, the vagrant victim 
had come to grief a minute or two after 
the luckless half -hour of employment 
had expired. 

Whatever you may think of this 
matter, — however exaggerated that bit 
of satire may seem, if it do not happen 
to appeal to you, — there can be little 
question that two aspirations of mod- 
ern workingmen tend queerly toward 
a renewal of privileges supposed to 
have been swept from earth by the 
great Revolution. Among the most 
obvious abuses of the elder time was 
the fact that a good many worthless, or 

r 39 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

at least inefficient, people managed to 
get themselves comfortably supported 
at public expense. Sometimes they 
held offices, which were often sinecures ; 
sometimes they were unblushingly pen- 
sioned, once for all; and people who 
grew warm for human rights waxed 
hot over such palpable wrongs. After 
a hundred years of crescent democ- 
racy, these practices reveal themselves 
hardly so much in the light of wrongs 
as in that of specific manifestations of an 
enduring human tendency — weakness, 
I might have said, if the fashion of our 
philanthropic day had permitted the 
attribution of weakness to so divine a 
thing as humanity. Compulsory em- 
ployment by the state, or at least by 
command of the state, and old age 
pensions are now eagerly urged on all 
sides. We have already reminded 
ourselves of the tirade of Figaro. The 
[40] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

very words of it would apply to the 
Elysian existence into which the work- 
ingman would enter, should these as- 
pirations of his come to pass. To en- 
joy comfort, no matter whether he 
work well or ill, and to enjoy the 
luxury of untrammelled leisure in his 
later years he need do only one very 
simple thing, namely, give himself the 
trouble to be born. 

All these tendencies, which none of 
us can deny, whether they command 
our approval or excite our dread, are 
among the causes at present involving 
the whole world in increased public 
expense. To meet increased public 
expense there must be found increased 
public revenue. On general principles 
you would suppose that this increasing 
burden ought to be borne proportion- 
ately by all members of society, all of 
whom should thus be made to feel, 
[41 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

each in his degree, the monitory truth 
that things as they are begin to cost 
considerably more than things as they 
used to be. Whether there be any 
good sense in these general principles 
I am not prepared to dispute. What 
seems certainly the case is that a com- 
pletely contrary assumption at present 
underlies a good deal of legislation, 
and innumerable public utterances, 
all over the civilized world. The in- 
herent justice and wisdom of what 
is called progressive taxation are as- 
serted, right and left, almost as com- 
monplaces. In plain words, this means, 
for example, that if you inherit a thou- 
sand dollars, or enjoy an income of that 
amount, you need pay no direct tax at 
all; that if your income or your in- 
heritance amount to ten thousand dol- 
lars, you must pay a tax of five hun- 
dred ; that an inheritance or an income 
[42] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

of a hundred thousand dollars shall 
subject you to a tax of ten thousand; 
and so on, until we get to confiscation. 
These figures, of course, are purely 
hypothetical. They illustrate the prin- 
ciple, I believe, with complete fairness ; 
and the principle means that the 
poorer you are the less you need feel 
the weight of any public burden. If 
you are poor enough, you need not feel 
it at all. If this be not class privilege, 
I for one have no conception of what 
class privilege ever was or ever can be. 
The term, no doubt, stays odious. 
It proved particularly objectionable, I 
am told, to a youth with whom a friend 
of mine happened, not long ago, to be 
discussing this phase of our question. 
The young man, who appeared to be 
temperamentally something of a re- 
former, was candid enough to admit 
that, ideally, the burden of taxation 
[43] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ought to be distributed equally ; but he 
could see little reason for dwelling on 
the fact that the most equal distribu- 
tion of the burden is a proportionate 
one — a dollar for a hundred dollars, for 
example, and a thousand dollars for a 
hundred thousand. The whole ques- 
tion, he presently opined, is ideal — as 
no doubt it is. In point of sad fact, 
somebody so far has had to bear more 
than his share of the unwelcome load. 
Very good; in that case, the philan- 
thropic young disputant held, the proper 
people to bear it are the possessors of 
what have sometimes been described as 
" swollen fortunes." Convenient though 
the vagueness of this indefinite term 
may be, it hardly clears the air of ani- 
mated discussion. So a precise question 
presently arose, as to how large, or 
rather how small, a fortune might fair- 
ly be regarded as swollen to a point 
[ 44 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

where it ought equitably to become an 
exceptional object of direct taxation. 
On this point, the youth's opinion 
seemed decided: a fortune began to 
look plethoric when its possessor en- 
joyed an income of more than five 
thousand dollars a year. Five thousand 
a year, he added, ought to be kept free 
from taxation. Just why this limit 
seemed to him so final my friend ven- 
tured to inquire. The reason was 
clear: his father, he said, had worked 
hard all his life ; he had got somewhere 
near five thousand a year at last^ and it 
would be monstrous to deprive such a 
man of the small luxuries which he 
could now afford from his honest earn- 
ings — even to the last penny thereof. 

We have lingered long enough over 

these various commonplaces of our 

contemporary democracy. The one 

thing about them which may perhaps 

[45] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

be held not commonplace is that you 
can hardly feel them to present them- 
selves, m the light of common-sense, as 
inspiring examples of the spirit of fair 
play. There is certainly an aspect in 
which they look rather like renewed 
assertion of a principle which we con- 
ventionally suppose obsolete — the prin- 
ciple of deliberately demanded privilege. 
The chief difference of this new form 
of privilege from the old lies in the fact 
that the old privilege was established in 
favour of the upper classes, and that 
the new privilege is establishing itself 
in favour of the lower. 

These terms — upper classes and 
lower — are doubtless invidious. In- 
vidious or not, they are the best we 
have for a fact invariable throughout 
civilized history. At any given mo- 
ment, anywhere, you will find certain 
classes of people, just as you will find 
[46 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

certain individuals, who have out- 
stripped others in the unending, inevi- 
table struggle for existence. Language 
must describe conditions like this ; other- 
wise humanity could not reason. And 
not only our own English but every 
other language of which I have cogniz- 
ance has chosen conventionally to de- 
scribe the difference of classes in any 
society by a faded metaphor of stratifica- 
tion. Those who have succeeded, on the 
whole, in the struggle, or the race, for 
social prosperity, it has called the upper 
classes, to distinguish them from the 
lower classes, whom they have out- 
stripped. Everywhere and always they 
have been objects of envy, and of envy 
by no means all unwarrantable. For, 
once assured of even momentary domi- 
nance, they have everywhere attempted 
to protect and to perpetuate them- 
selves by all manner of artificial de- 
[47] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

vices. Artifice, however, can never 
supplant nature. Able men from the 
lower classes have everywhere inces- 
santly risen to the upper. Feeble folk 
in the upper classes have constantly 
sunk towards the lower. Juggle with 
humanity as you will, you can never 
prevent its division into [the many and 
the few. One is not irreverent who be- 
gins to recognize in the contrast a law 
of God. 

Face to face with this tremendous 
truth, we can hardly help asking what 
qualities, on the whole, seem through 
the centuries to have distinguished 
these groups from one another. Both 
are consummately human — which 
means that both have virtues and both 
faults, singularly similar in a thousand 
ways. What is more, the faults of the 
upper classes, partly by reason of their 
very emergence, are often more con- 
[48] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

spicuous than their vhiues; and the 
virtues of the lower classes, partly by 
reason of their submergence, often 
seem more instantly salient than their 
faults. The bottom of things above 
you is what meets the eye, whoever or 
wherever you are, and the top of things 
below. The question now before us, 
however, is not one of abstract virtue 
or vice; it is rather a plain matter of 
fact. Why do some people rise ? Why 
do others fall ? Why do some emerge ? 
Why are others submerged beneath the 
surface of the whirling stream of life 
until their very names are forgotten, 
which once were known ? 

To dwell here on actual instances of 
prosperity or of failure might be un- 
seemly. After all, it is better to gener- 
alize — to bid each of us recall the 
literal stories for himself. In our own 
country, throughout all living memory, 
[ 49 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the openness of careers to talent has 
been almost the widest in human his- 
tory. Tell yourselves that which you 
yourselves do know of families and of 
men who have risen or have fallen in 
the course of the nineteenth century. 
If you tell yourselves the stories un- 
flinchingly, I believe, nothing can 
gleam much more clearly than the 
truth that the qualities of those who 
have risen, surpassing their faults, are 
intelligence, industry, ability, charac- 
ter ; and that the qualities of those who 
have sunk, overwhelming their virtues, 
are rather stupidity, sloth, inefficiency 
and weakness. Sobriety and drunken- 
ness may imply the story in two words ; 
or licentiousness arid continence; or 
frugality and extravagance; or dili- 
gence and laziness or at best alertness 
and dulness. Perhaps the two words 
of all which imply it most comprehen- 
[50] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

sively are responsibility and irrespon- 
sibility. We have ventured to suppose 
that the law of which we are trying to 
give ourselves account is a law of God. 
Whether it be or no, we cannot can- 
didly hold it inequitable. 

If this be true, and if it be true at the 
same time that, having rid the world of 
avowed privilege in favour of the re- 
sponsible, we are unwittingly shack- 
ling it again with unperceived privi- 
lege in favour of the irresponsible, 

"New presbyter is but old priest writ large." 

What is before us no mere man of let- 
ters may confidently prophesy, or clearly 
forsee. It may, indeed, be Utopia, 
close at hand beyond the mists. It 
may be a new barbarism, darker than 
that in which the glory that was Greece 
and the grandeur that was Rome passed 

r 51 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

away from the sunshine for a thousand 
years. Only one thing seems sure. It 
will not be the generous persistence of 
that noble phase of democracy which 
throughout the first century of our na- 
tional existence has been the inspiring 
glory of our American United States. 
For among ourselves, hitherto, all priv- 
ilege — be it for the high or be it for the 
lowly — has been held equally hateful. 
We have striven, perhaps in vain, to 
maintain a country where men shall be 
free to win not their aspirations, but 
their deserts. 



[52] 



II 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



II 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

To maintain a country, a society, a 
nation where, so far as earthly condi- 
tions may permit, all men shall be free 
to win what they deserve — that seems 
a fair statement of our deepest American 
ideal. Life, liberty, the pursuit of hap- 
piness we hold not as privileges, but as 
rights — as ends towards which no hu- 
man being may justly be prevented 
from pressing with all the energy he 
can command. In perfection, they are 
doubtless unattainable. Life, at least 
in this state of being, has its inexorable 
limits, the tragic certainty of which has 
led countless millions through the ages 
[55] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

to consolatory faith in an unseen world 
where renewed life shall persist un- 
ending. It is partly, perhaps, recogni- 
tion of this superhuman aspiration of 
mankind, and of the truth that, how- 
ever earnest men may be, they can 
never all agree in matters of religion, 
which has made the principle of relig- 
ious freedom so dear to the hearts of 
true Americans. The right to life, as 
it were, implies the right to uncon- 
trolled faith in the life which is eternal; 
the right to liberty implies freedom to 
conceive this life to come in whatever 
guise may seem most nearly true; the 
right to the pursuit of happiness im- 
plies that each of us may seek for spir- 
itual comfort in this most profound and 
enduring of its phases, as suits him best. 
No one would pretend, to be sure, that 
America has been innocent of religious 
dispute. Yet there seems, on the whole, 
[56] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

no region of recorded history where 
religious dispute has been suffered to 
interfere less with freedom of conscience 
than is the case among ourselves to-day. 
At bottom — orthodox or infidel — we 
believe that the truth has such inherent 
strength, such divine vitality that it must 
finally win its deserts when it has the 
happiness to seek them in a country 
like ours. 

This matter of our religious freedom 
is perhaps as characteristic of our 
national temper as any which could be 
called to mind. None, I think, could 
more fully imply our confidence that 
desert should have its due. We com- 
monly grant to religious societies, no 
doubt, certain exemptions from the 
full burden of taxation ; but we equally 
grant such exemptions to educational 
societies and to charitable. We respect 
all earnest effort to improve the body, 
[57] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the mind or the soul. Any special 
privilege to any given faith, on the 
other hand, — even though that faith 
chance to be one's own, — is abhorrent 
to our generous national convictions. 
Let each creed — like each man — have 
its deserts. In these, and only in these, 
we will protect it. And in these we 
have come to protect creeds and men, 
and all the other creatures of our com- 
plicated social and economic life, by 
means of the political system at present 
tending to dominance throughout the 
world, — the government of the people, 
by the people, for the people. No 
American can fail to feel the eloquence 
of those simple words wherein Lincoln 
enshrined the ideal of American de- 
mocracy. 

His emphasis, beyond dispute, was on 
the people; but not on the people in 
any blind and volatile omnipotence of 
[58] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

multiplex tyranny. There are mo- 
ments, indeed, when the stress of his 
meaning might better be laid not on 
the people, but on what the people may 
be trusted to sustain — on government. 
Without government of some efficient 
kind, no society can persist. For, un- 
less the history of the human race, from 
the beginning to this day, be altogether 
delusive, prosperity and righteousness, 
life itself and liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness, can be preserved here below 
only under governments which keep 
secure the two great bases of civiliza- 
tion — public order and private prop- 
erty. 

Government, then, by jealous yet 
submissive consent of the people who, 
in their full extent of varied being, high 
and low, are at once the governors and 
the governed, is the true political ideal 
of America. Despite the errors and the 
[59] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

infirmities of the men through whose 
mortal hands such government must 
be changingly and fleetingly adminis- 
tered, it may be trusted, we beheve, to 
work for the good of the whole people, 
strong and weak, wise and foolish, rich 
and poor. Democracy, as we conceive 
it, is not a rabble, enviously destructive 
of all but its own vilest phase; nor is it 
a little body of superiors imposing their 
beneficent will on those beneath them. 
In its all-embracing entirety it gener- 
ously comprises all alike — all con- 
sciously the happier for the inestimable 
variety of character, of condition, of 
powers which must consent in the su- 
perb unity of its comprehensive life. Far 
from actual realization as ideals must 
always be, this earnestly cherished 
aspiration of American democracy has 
thus far stayed unbroken and consist- 
ent. If you doubt, ask any American 
[60] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

to tell you, not what our people have 
done, but what at heart, in those better 
moments which most deeply disclose 
the hidden secrets of the spirit, our 
people have believed, and have tried 
to be. 

He will perhaps tell you at the same 
time that all this came into existence 
with the government which, after its 
full century of accumulating national 
vigour, has unwittingly grown during 
the past generation into a power so 
considerable that it must reluctantly 
concern itself with the larger politics of 
the world. Nations, like religions, come 
swiftly to have their legends; and this 
blameless legend of our popular elo- 
quence and our public schools has long 
been a matter of unquestioning Ameri- 
can faith. In common with legends 
more airy, if not less inspiring, it has 
the misfortune that it cannot withstand, 
[61] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

at least in literal integrity, the higher 
criticism even of the most orthodox. If 
you are heartless enough to turn on it 
the clear, white light of authentic record, 
its beauty fades, or glows, into that of 
a pious tale. For what we call the 
American Revolution, declaring our 
independence in 1776, and establishing 
our Constitution in 1788, made no 
radical change in the life or in the tem- 
per of the previously unrecognized 
nation which it finally brought into 
political being. It hardly changed the 
form of government or of other law to 
which that nation, inevitably rather 
than deliberately democratic, had long 
submitted. It merely proclaimed to 
a somewhat surprised world, wherein 
Americans themselves were apparently 
the most surprised of all, that a cen- 
tury and a half of juvenile colonial 
growth had brought us to an adoles- 
[62] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

cence no longer amenable to the disci- 
pline of parental control. It destroyed 
nothing but the formal ties which had 
hitherto bound us to the Mother Coun- 
try. Its ultimate work was hardly de- 
structive at all; it preserved, rather, it 
sustained and it strengthened the char- 
acter, the ideals, the rights, the aspira- 
tions of a nation which the tremendous 
course of history has already made, the 
oldest in the world. 

For not only are the roots of our 
national life buried deep in the soil of 
Seventeenth Century England, but since 
the War of our Independence brought 
that national life into final being, every 
single country in Europe has under- 
gone political and social change far 
more radical than any which has yet 
come to ours. In 1789, when Washing- 
ton became the first of the presidents 
who have successively and consti- 
[63] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

tutionally embodied our popular sov- 
ereignty to the present day, George III 
was still long to be King of an unre- 
formed England, Louis XVI and Marie 
Antoinette were still on the throne of 
pre-Revolutionary France, and the 
family of Buonaparte were only re- 
spectable gentlefolk of Corsica. These 
very names must call to mind the gen- 
eral course of ensuing history. Since the 
American Revolution, — as we have al- 
ways named our War of Independence, 
— ^finally revealed the ripeness of our 
national institutions, and brought into 
enduring existence the single ancestral 
democracy of modern times, the whole 
European world has undergone repeated 
experience of internal revolution, con- 
stitutional so far as forms go in Eng- 
land, elsewhere violent in manifesta- 
tion, and everywhere profoundly modi- 
fying both social structure and political 
[ 64 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

ideals. In protean forms, no doubt, 
the nations of Europe, one and all, are 
centuries older than we. In actual 
constitution, just as in the flag which 
excites our exuberantly demonstrative 
loyalty, we have altered so little while 
they have changed so much that it is 
they who unperceived have become the 
new, and we the old. 

True revolution, in fact, has shaken 
them all. What this means we all in- 
stinctively know. To state it, the 
while, in general terms, is troublesome. 
A century of intermittent revolution, 
hardly yet conclusively accomplished 
anywhere, has made the word, like the 
fact it stands for, terribly disturbing. 
There are thousands of good people 
to whom the slightest suggestion of 
Revolution sounds diabolical. There 
are other thousands, and probably far 
more, to whom it implies the passion- 
[ 65] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ate rising of humanity towards some- 
thing nearer the height of divinity. 
There are few — only hundreds, one 
might almost say, in comparison, — 
whom it leaves indifferent. And here 
we are trying to speak for all. Yet 
one and all — revolutionist, reaction- 
ary or indifferent — may, perhaps, agree 
to some such statement as this of 
what, at heart, Revolution has been: 
Wherever it has occurred, the course 
of social and political history has slowly 
managed to develop certain palpable 
kinds of privilege. Generally sanctioned 
in its origin by what approach to pub- 
lic opinion may then have existed, this 
privilege has gradually come to seem 
oppressive, repressive of opportunity, 
heartless, monstrous, wrong. In the 
minds of Revolutionists established cus- 
tom is honestly held as nothing in com- 
parison with abstract rights. So when, 
[66] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

for any cause, — social, political or eco- 
nomic, — the moment comes when Rev- 
olutionists can act, they surge forward, 
with contagiously sincere moral fervour, 
and ruthlessly attack the out- worn privi- 
lege which has impeded the course of 
what they deem human progress. Their 
motive is always philanthropic, their 
intention generally constructive. To 
construct on old ground, however, you 
must first destroy; to benefit mankind 
you must first enfranchise them. Rev- 
olutionists are never unresisted, nor is 
the resistance ever without a reaction- 
ary moral fervour of its own, as genuine 
as theirs, even though less contagious. 
The conflict is not only a conflict of in- 
terests, it is a conflict of faiths. All 
men admit, in sober moments, that hu- 
man life must have its evils ; but some 
believe that every evil which shows its 
head must be attacked, and others be- 
[67] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

lieve, on the contrary, that, bad as 
things are, the world might rather be 
worse than better. So passion runs high. 
Neither party does justice to the higher 
purposes of the other. One thing is 
pretty sure to occur. Privilege comes 
to grief, sometimes finally, sometimes 
only for a while. If, in such event, the 
older forms of privilege can in any way 
manage to revive, they are merciless, 
when even momentarily reestablished, 
to anybody who has threatened them. 
If Revolution prevail, traditional privi- 
lege fares even worse than defeated 
Revolutionists; for, like other militant 
professors of charity. Revolution is 
seldom conspicuous for mercy to op- 
ponents. Its purpose remains through- 
out to establish new and more nearly 
equal human rights. Its actual work 
seems often to be rather the uninten- 
tional establishment of new and un- 
[68] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

tested privilege. Here lies its most / 
insidious danger. 

Vaguely though this be stated, it is 
probably enough to remind us of two 
facts in our American history. The 
first is that the American Revolution 
can come within any such general con- 
ception of revolution only when we limit 
our view to its political aspect. It fi- 
nally separated us from the British sov- 
ereignty which we had grown to feel 
alien. It permanently disrupted what 
had previously been the united British 
Empire. Among ourselves, however, 
it had no deeply revolutionary results. 
Society and law, public order and pri- 
vate property were not profoundly or 
lastingly disturbed. Rip Van Winkle, on 
waking, found himself, no doubt, in a 
new world, but not in a world unrec- 
ognizably changed from that whence he 
had strayed to his enchanted sleep. 
[ 69] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Though the quiet Dutch inn was re- 
placed by a wooden barrack and the sign 
of red-coated King George had changed 
into that of blue and buff General 
Washington, the rubicund visage was 
unaltered. AmericaA citizens enjoyed 
much the same rights and securities 
which had blessed them when British 
subjects, — and they had invented 
hardly any new ones. 

The second fact in our history which 
our reflections on revolution may well 
call to mind is one which, at least in our 
Northern regions, we are not habitually 
given to regarding as precisely revolu- 
tionary at all. Yet after a little calm 
consideration, we may very seriously be- 
gin to doubt whether any social revolu- 
tion has ever wrought more tremendous 
changes than those brought about in 
our Southern States by the Civil War. 
In 1860, throughout these states, there 
[70] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

was an established condition of society 
and of property, on the whole agreeable 
to most residents enjoying the rights of 
citizenship and of ownership, but else- 
where believed less welcome to their 
slaves, who enjoyed neither. The 
causes of the Civil War and the details 
of its history are beyond our present 
scope. There can be little question 
that it was something widely different 
from the philanthropic crusade into 
which so much Northern tradition has 
already transfigured it. North and 
South alike, indeed, would to-day agree 
that its fundamental purpose was to 
settle the question finally answered by 
its result — the question of the mainte- 
nance and preservation of that national 
Union whose full-grown strength has 
now brought our nationality face to face 
with empire. Yet, at the same time, 
North and South would equally agree 
[71] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

that without the fervour which burned 
high, on the one hand, for the rights of 
man, black or white, and on the other, 
for the rights of local sovereignty and 
the maintenance of its established in- 
stitutions, the Civil War could never 
have broken out quite as was the case. 
There were four years of brave con- 
test. In the course of them, as a war 
measure analogous to the confiscation of 
an enemy's property, President Lincoln 
proclaimed the slaves free. And when, 
at last, the armed force of the South 
was exhausted, the whole structure of 
Southern society was in ruins. 

Revolution or not, no revolution has 
ever wrought more havoc than existed 
and ensued there. The old political 
rights, for one thing, believed by the 
popular opinion of the victors to have 
been no better than privileges, were 
swept away. Political rights were 
[72] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

presently thrust upon the negroes, who 
had neither enjoyed them before nor 
had the sHghtest training for the ser- 
ious duties of American citizenship. The 
whole new condition of labour, too, 
was untested, by employer and by em- 
ployed alike. The most characteristic, 
if not the most important, form of prop- 
erty had meanwhile been stricken out of 
existence. The slaves, immemorially 
objects of purchase and sale, and 
wholly inexperienced in responsibility, 
not only became the political equals of 
their former masters, with full freedom 
of contract, but often found themselves 
in a majority which placed under their 
control the practical conduct of all 
public affairs. One might go on indefi- 
nitely and indisputably. The wonder 
would grow that less than fifty years 
have made this appalling confusion a 
matter of the past, already discussed, 
[73] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

on both sides, in the critical spirit of 
science and of history. If this were 
not revolution, one might suppose, rev- 
olution can never occur. 

This great political and social convul- 
sion was perhaps needful, and surely 
in the end it has been more than 
justified, even for the sufferers, by the 
national integrity which it has finally 
brought about. Now that it has passed 
into history, on the other hand, the 
horrors of it and the hardships, even 
for the party who prevailed, have a 
poignancy which should give us pause. 
If this were called the American Revo- 
lution, the chastened spirit of America 
could hardly cherish the conception of 
Revolution as of something all glorious 
— to be eagerly prophesied, to be 
longed for, to be urged on. Grant that 
revolution be needful; it is not for that 
the less awful, the less terrible. Even 

r 74 1 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

though a necessity, it is a necessity to be 
faced not with enthusiasm and rejoic- 
ing, but rather with fasting and prayer. 
And that fasting and prayer, on both 
sides, consecrated again and again the 
hfe and death struggle of American 
Union is among the deepest reasons 
why all Americans may join in holding 
the memory of that struggle noble. 

When, in moods like this, we thus 
begin to ponder on the American Rev- 
olution, which wrought so little internal 
havoc, and on the Civil War, which, in 
one great portion of our country, 
wrought so much, we may well come 
to the surprising conclusion that the 
two conflicts have somehow got mislead- 
ingly, bewilderingly misnamed. They 
were both revolutions, if you will; 
whether you will or no, they were both 
civil wars; and that which we call our 
Civil War seems, in many aspects, the 
[75] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

more profoundly revolutionary of the 
two. A little further reflection, however, 
leads one to feel that our name for it is 
fundamentally true, and that our pop- 
ular error, if error it be, in deeming our 
first great conflict to have been revolu- 
tionary and our second to have been 
something different, springs rather from 
the fact that our unimpeded American 
and English usage has always de- 
scribed our first civil war as the Ameri- 
can Revolution, pure and simple. In 
each case, a passionate and inevitable 
civil war was not pervasive of the 
empire which it tore, or threatened to 
tear, asunder. In the American Revo- 
olution. Great Britain was arrayed 
against her transatlantic colonies. In 
the American Civil War, North was 
arrayed against South, the slave states 
a£:ainst the states where labour was 
free. In both cases, the contest was real- 
[76] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

\y sectional; in neither internal. Com- 
pare them both with the great European 
revolution — the French — and you will 
instantly feel the deep difference. To 
be completely revolutionary, in the full 
sense of the term, a conflict must be 
something more, and more appalling, 
than a conflict between sections of any 
country. Sectional conflict has innu- 
merable features which remind us 
rather of conflicts plainly international. 
The American Revolution — civil war 
though it were — seems in perspective 
very like the determined repulse of an 
invasion; the Civil War — revolution 
though it wrought — seems very like a 
bravely resisted military conquest. The 
sadness and the heroism of each alike 
were not so much those of revolution 
as of more generalized warfare, between 
kinsfolk who prayed and disputed in 
their common language. From true 
[77] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

revolution, from a pervasive national 
disorder originating and raging within 
itself — from such ordeal as the end of 
the eighteenth century brought to 
France and as the course of the nine- 
teenth century had kept recurrent 
throughout Europe, — America has hith- 
erto been spared. It is no play with 
words to assure ourselves, as solemnly 
as we may, that the decisive American 
revolution — the convulsion which should 
change us from the eldest of extant na- 
tions to the newest, from the ancestral 
home of constitutional democracy to 
some nursery of newly devised privilege, 
— is still to come, if come it must. 
And whoever believes that it must 
come, or longs that it shall, proves 
himself something else than a tradi- 
tional American. 

He is not traditionally American, at 
least, in loyalty to what America has 
[78] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

been and has accomplished — in faith 
that our past has proved itself worthy 
to be the monitor of our future. No 
past was ever so admirable that one 
could wish to revive it or to prolong it 
changeless. No future ever stretched 
before human vision without mirage 
of unexplored regions, wherein hu- 
manity might find opportunity denied 
it while still confined within its tested 
limits. One who should recoil towards 
the past for fear of what the future may 
enfold, would lack the buoyant courage 
which we believe to have marked the 
spirit of our country. But one who 
should utterly disdain the past because 
in the past there have been evils, — one 
who should dream that the future can 
ever comprise all of the better history of 
mankind, — would be still less faithful 
to our American ideals. For although 
our elder utterances have often sounded 
[79] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

disdainful of things which have been, 
giving welcome only to things which 
are to be, the persistent conduct of our 
country has been characterized by a wis- 
dom, a prudence, a steadfast good-sense 
long since believed historically to have 
justified our national faith in such de- 
mocracy as ours. And your revolution- 
ist, denying the truth of that faith, — at 
least in every guise as yet assumed 
thereby, unless it be the guise of hasty 
and unthinking utterance, — would have 
us believe that the history of our United 
States, like the histories of those elder 
nations who have thriven for a while, 
and crashed at last into ruin, is already 
no better than a nightmare from which 
it is time to waken. 

It is time for us, the while, you may 

well feel, to come down from these 

clouds of generalization. After all, 

you may long have been asking, what 

[80] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

precise facts of the past, and what 
probable dangers of the future, are we 
actually bringing to mind ? Such con- 
siderations as ours have at once the 
charm, for those who feel it, and the 
danger, perceptible to sympathetic tem- 
pers and to dubious alike, of straying 
into elusive swirls of thin verbiage. 
What is more, when we attempt to 
make them more definite, we are met 
by the double difficulty that the past is 
bewildering in its complexity and the 
future illimitable in its uncertainty. A 
typical example of what has been and 
of what may be — a selection from the 
past, a conjectural prophecy of a con- 
ceivable future — will help us to re- 
mind ourselves of just what we are 
trying to lay hold of. We cannot 
specify everything. That is no reason 
why we should flutter interminably 
above the level of solid earth. 
[ 81 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

A little while ago we reminded our- 
selves that, unless the persistent ad- 
monition of history be mere chatter, 
the state of human society called civi- 
lization — a state assumed to be, on the 
whole, happier than those from which 
it is distinguished — can exist only when 
two substantial foundations of it are 
secure. These are public order and 
private property. The first is clearly 
essential to the second. Human nature, 
whatever its conceivable excellences, 
has never yet revealed itself in so nearly 
divine a condition that it may confi- 
dently be trusted to behave decently 
when uncontrolled. The traditional 
fancies of natural warfare and of social 
compact, I dare say, have no basis in 
recorded fact or in fact ascertained by 
the scrutiny of science. All the same 
they possess — in common with outworn 
theologies and cosmologies — the virtue 
[82] 



THE A^IERICAN REVOLUTION 

of leading us to perceive truths not quite 
evident without them. The salutary 
truths here in question are that orderly 
government is essential to the existence 
of civilized society, and that civilized 
society is what has hitherto distin- 
guished men from brutes. Imagine, if 
you can, a world without police, or with- 
out highways for them to police. If 
you be not beguiled by some fairy fancy 
of anarchy, you will find it, in any ap- 
proach to terms of conceivable reality, 
a world where you would never dare 
venture out of doors — except for the 
incidental fact that it might probably 
contain few doors behind which you 
could regularly find protection. The 
means of securing public order have 
been widely various. To venturesome 
spirits, the best of them must sometimes 
seem irksome. What has distinguished 
ours of America from most which have 
[83] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

prevailed elsewhere, and in former times 
has been the candour of its admission 
that its true basis is common consent. 
This is democracy in its public aspect. 
Public order once reasonably secure, 
private property is bound to follow. 
That it involves hardships and evils no 
one need deny. That, on the whole, it 
appeals to the normal instincts of hu- 
man nature is even less contestable. 
Let a man who amounts to anything 
alone, in a region where he can feel 
reasonably safe, and he will set himself 
to work, thereby earning in his own 
opinion — and in the opinion which has 
underlain healthy legislation through- 
out the past — various rights superior to 
those of people who, not amounting to 
much, have preferred to remain idle. 
The more skilful he is, or the more 
able, the more he will earn. Ability 
and skill, too, will tend to bring him 
[84] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

into a position of command over other 
people, less happily endowed by nat- 
ure than he or less energetic, or less in- 
dustrious, or for any other reason of less 
consequence. As society grows more 
civilized, and incidentally affairs be- 
come more complicated, the faculty of 
direction, of control, of command will 
turn out to have increasingly vital im- 
portance and w411 thus come to earn 
rewards more considerable than those 
bestowed on other faculties, however 
respectable or remarkable, which are 
either more frequent or less necessary. 
Incidentally, as a matter of course, — 
for human beings are leaky vessels, 
— the process which we have been con- 
sidering so simply will be rather per- 
plexingly complicated by the persistent 
intrusion of knavery in various forms. 
It is possible that you might collect 
many thousands of men without en- 
[85] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

meshing a single saint; you would be 
at pains to find a dozen anywhere un- 
tainted by symptoms of human weak- 
ness — or, to put the case less reticently, 
without lighting on some sorry rascal. 
But, despite all your prosperous knaves, 
the conduct of human affairs, by and 
large, must be honest. If it were not, 
no double entries in bookkeeping would 
ever quite balance; and if books did 
not balance, as a rule,, everything 
would be nowhere, when we come to 
business. Hitherto, on the whole, 
property and the rights which go with 
it have proved worth while. Speaking 
generally, they have tended to put 
men in possession of just about what 
their variously diverse powers prove 
them to deserve. When we touched, 
not long ago, on the necessity of public 
order, we tried to imagine what a con- 
dition of public anarchy would really 
[86] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

be like. Try now to imagine what the 
world would be like if some occasional 
dreams of socialism should come true; 
and see whether you can conceive it 
much otherwise than as a place where — 
if anything of civilized value should per- 
sist — people would find themselves en- 
titled, by the mere fact of existence, to 
all manner of things which they have 
neither the muscle nor the wit to earn by 
honest work. Socialistic fancies now 
and again glow with dreamily philan- 
thropic beauty; but they can never 
have much in common with our un- 
compromising and robust old-fash- 
ioned insistence that everybody has a 
right to earn what he can. 

Now hitherto American democracy 
has proved itself servant of civilization 
not only by its maintenance of public 
order, but also by its sturdy determina- 
tion that, so far as may be on earth, you 
[87] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

and I and all of us, high or low, shall 
be protected in at least two rights of 
private property — the right peacefully 
to possess what we may be able to ac- 
quire and the right freely to dispose of it. 
No one would pretend that the efforts 
of our democracy to maintain these 
rights have been flawless as a matter 
either of intelligence or of efficiency; 
not a few wise and good men would 
point out various aspects in which these 
efforts seem at best blundering, and 
sometimes hypocritically mischievous. 
Hardly anyone, the while, at least of 
those who have been nurtured in our 
ancestral American traditions, would 
deny that America has hitherto be- 
lieved these rights to stand high among 
the things which ought to be. And no 
one, I think, can question that the 
right to possess property is never com- 
plete unless the possessor enjoy full 
[88] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

freedom of contract, and that the right 
to dispose of property is never com- 
plete unless he enjoy full freedom of 

gift. 

At least in this country, it is precisely 
these two phases of freedom which, on 
the whole, have led to such disturb- 
ances of equilibrium as happen, at this 
moment, to be feverishly in the public 
mind. Freedom of contract must evi- 
dently allow people to make as many 
agreements, and agreements as extensive 
as may lie within their imagination, their 
power, or their daring. The most im- 
aginative men, the most able and the 
most courageous — better still, those in 
whom the qualities in question are 
most nearly fused, and whom our pop- 
ular usage describes as the most enter- 
prising — will make more agreements 
concerning vitally important affairs 
than men less happily endowed. Many 
[89] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

of them will incidentally come to grief. 
Enough of them, however, will luckily 
or skilfully avoid it, to make a pretty 
clearly marked class of the rich, as dis- 
tinguished not only from the poor, but 
from the vast class of respectable 
people who manage to make both ends 
meet without overlapping. Wealth un- 
questionably brings its temptations, 
and its manifold other forms of insidi- 
ously tolerable evil. Whether these are 
more objectionable than the vices char- 
acteristic of classes not wealthy or not, 
these classes will always tend to re- 
gard them as so. All the ensuing de- 
nunciation of wealth, however, can 
hardly hide from common-sense the 
truth that it results, on the whole, 
from lines of conduct held praiseworthy 
even by its enemies, and that to legislate 
against it without ominous danger to 
that freedom of contract on which all 
[90] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

personal independence is based— and 
most chance, for that matter, of earn- 
ing the full value of your work wher- 
ever you are situated,— seems beyond 
human ingenuity. For such benevolent- 
ly socialistic legislation virtually com- 
mands healthy people to conduct their 
lives as if they were chronic invalids. 

Freedom of gift, the while, leads to 
a disturbance of equilibrium rather 
more exasperating to those who feel 
themselves aggrieved by its results. 
Abstractly, so far as we can see, no one 
would object to it. Let anything be in 
your legal possession, from a toy to a 
fortune, and common consent would 
agree that you have a complete right 
to give it or any part of it to whomever 
you may choose thus to gladden. The 
ragged child who treats his friend to a 
bite from his single warm apple exer- 
cises the same benevolent and generous 
[91] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

right which permits people in less lim- 
ited eicumstances to build museums, or 
to endow universities. This right be- 
gins as soon as you possess anything 
whatever; it lasts as long as you are 
free from jail, the madhouse, or the 
grave. And within limits which have 
generally been very wide, you are at 
liberty to exercise it under any condi- 
tions agreeable to your principles or 
your whims at the moment when it is 
exercised. 

As a matter of fact, the while, nat- 
ural affections are still so frequent, 
even amid the most complex distrac- 
tions of civilized society, that people are 
apt to give most freely to those who are 
their nearest and their dearest — if pos- 
sible, to those who are both. Generally 
speaking, these are obviously their 
wives, their children and other members 
of their families. As a matter of fact, 
[92] 



THE MIERICAN REVOLUTION 

meanwhile, wives and children must 
habitually present themselves to affec- 
tionate or anxious husbands and fathers 
as lovable beings in need of protection ; 
a normal husband and father, further- 
more, like anybody else who has come 
to enjoy full possession of property, is 
usually of opinion that it stays safer in 
his own hands than it would be any- 
where else. From some such consider- 
ations as these has arisen not, to be sure, 
the literal history of testamentary law, 
but the general state of mind which 
makes so many people keep control of 
their property to the end of their lives, 
and then dispose of it by w^lls as elabo- 
rately conditioned as legal advice can 
make them. If you have a right to give 
anything away, you obviously have the 
right to do so at any moment you may 
prefer. If you are not superior to ordi- 
nary human considerations, you are 
[93] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

usually disposed to prefer the moment 
of your decease, which brings your per- 
sonal need of the object in question to 
an unquestionable end. If you have 
the right to impose conditions on a gift 
at any time, there seems no valid ob- 
jection to your imposing them at this 
melancholy moment as specifically as 
would have been the case earlier. 

One somewhat disconcerting result 
of this general line of conduct, however, 
long remarked in other countries than 
ours, is getting rather inconveniently 
evident in the older parts even of the 
United States, where fortune has tended 
to concentrate itself in comparatively 
few hands. The mere fact of wealth, 
even while it is still controlled by men 
who have proved able to accumulate 
and to manage it vigourously, we have 
seen to be exasperating to the tempers 
of people who find their means incon- 
[94] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

veniently limited. More exasperating 
still, in an insidiously subtle way, is the 
possession, through gift, of wealth by 
people who have neither earned it, 
nor displayed any characteristics which 
would lead you to suppose them able to 
do so. Most exasperating of all is the 
fact, when the exasperated realize it, 
that a considerable proportion of these 
beneficiaries enjoy the fruits of wealth 
without experiencing the burden of its 
most elementary responsibilities ; for by 
the express command of the testators 
who have provided for them, they are 
forbidden to have anything to say 
about the management of the property 
of which they duly receive the income. 
There have been times, indeed, when 
contemplative people have ventured to 
surmise that there is rather less ultimate 
danger in the corporate Trusts, which 
have ensued with debatable legality 
[95] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

from freedom of contract, than in our 
immemorially legal system of trust es- 
tates held for the benefit of weak indi- 
viduals, which has sprung so luxuriant- 
ly from freedom of gift. 

The fundamental trouble here is that 
a considerable and probably an increas- 
ing portion of contemporary vested 
property, though enjoyed by the living, 
tends to remain in the management of 
the dead. The practical objection to 
what results does not end with the fact 
that now and again the living, who 
benefit by this system, are vacuous or 
otherwise unworthy. Whatever the 
qualities of the dead, none can be more 
generally characteristic than their in- 
ertia; as a class, they cannot possibly 
be enterprising. A man who, from his 
office, was able and eager to employ all 
his resources for the development of af- 
fairs, can hardly do more, from his 
[96] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

grave, than insist that what he has left 
behind him shall be lent only on the 
most prudent, and therefore by no 
means the most lucrative or the most 
useful terms. A whole system of law, 
controlling trustees and protecting 
beneficiaries, supports and shackles his 
insistence. Whoever is familiar with 
the present condition of New England 
can fill in the details of this sketch for 
himself. Instances of what ensues 
must occur all about him every day. 
People who know what they are talking 
about, for example, have been heard to 
assert that one important reason why 
the economic importance of Boston has 
dwindled is that the dead men of the 
past, safe and sound in Mount Auburn, 
will not rest content in their graves, but 
forbid their children to prove, by man- 
agement of increasingly bulky heredit- 
ary properties, how far they are able 
[97] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

to control the interests which moulder 
in the grasp of the buried fathers. 

Mortmain — ^the stiffened clutch of 
the dead — is no new thing in human 
experience; and the very term itself is 
enough to remind us of how deep the 
statutes against certain forms of it lie 
embedded in the strata of English law. 
Such needs as brought about the old 
statutes might well now, or at some 
convenient future time, give rise to 
new legislation, thoughtful and bene- 
ficial. To disturb any condition of law 
which, in spite of the evils inseparable 
from any human device, has been 
found, on the whole, to work tolerably, 
is no laughing matter — even though 
our recent American habit has some- 
times seemed to fancy it so. But to 
worship an existing state of affairs, just 
because it is habitual, — to repel all sug- 
gestion of modification which might 
[98] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

bring it more nearly into harmony with 
new human needs, — is a worse blunder 
still. To say precisely what might be 
done by way of correcting the evils of our 
new mortmain, if they really be so great 
as to need correction, no layman in the 
law may pretend. One thing, how- 
ever, seems fairly sure. Freedom of 
contract and freedom of gift — liberties 
which have proved needful to what has 
hitherto been held the healthy devel- 
opment of civilized society — might rest 
unimpaired; and yet much might be 
accomplished by a carefully drawn act 
forbidding for the future that the in- 
come of any property should be con- 
ferred by will on anyone, not evidently 
infirm, who does not, at the same time, 
assume the full control of it. A stroke 
of the pen might thus establish the 
healthy principle that whoever enjoys 
wealth must learn, at his peril, to bear 
[99] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the responsibilities of it. If under the 
circumstances he thrive, it will gener- 
ally be because he deserves to; if he 
meet with what we euphemistically call 
misfortune, it will generally be because 
he has not the sense to avoid the catas- 
trophe. At worst, the legislation which 
in that event may have ruined him, 
will not have been revolutionary. 

Revolutionary, on the other hand, is 
the only term by which we can prop- 
erly describe the sort of process some- 
times urged nowadays as most suitably 
corrective of evils like that at which we 
have glanced. To take property by 
sheer force out of private hands, ex- 
cept in case of sore public need, even 
though the state give compensation for 
the same, is only disguised confisca- 
tion. So is progressive taxation on 
incomes and still more on inheritances. 
Anything like enforced community of 
[ 100] 



THE MIERICAN REVOLUTION 

goods, such as is occasionally urged 
by honest philanthropists and other 
gatherers of wool, is confiscation pure 
and simple. And confiscation, dis- 
guised or open, — in other words, the 
arbitrary destruction of acknowledged 
rights, — is nothing more nor less than 
revolution. 

We may well seem to have been wan- 
dering far afield from this, our true sub- 
ject, together. The point at which we 
have arrived may perhaps assure us 
that we were less vagrant than we had 
thus supposed. That something like 
revolution hovered ominously in the 
air about us throughout our digression 
about property must now be fairly 
clear. That it is imminent or inevitable 
in no wise follows. Storms have gath- 
ered that have never burst — and over 
lands less happy than ours. The chief 
features in the storm which many good 
[101] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Americans fear to be threatening at 
this moment are fairly defined. Very 
broadly speaking, the increase in wealth 
and the concentration of it, which have 
resulted from the great material devel- 
opment of our country, have tended 
apparently to divide the people into 
two pretty distinct classes — the rich 
and the poor, or if you prefer, capital 
and labour. Whether this means that 
a decisive difference of interests has at 
last arisen, destined to cleave us fatally, 
is not the question. Popular feeling, 
a pretty serious fact in an immemorially 
democratic political society, expresses 
itself as if, with various degrees of wis- 
dom and folly, the people in general 
were disposed, at least for the while, to 
believe the antagonism profound. What 
is more, the tremendous increase in ease 
of communication throughout the world 
which has crowned the first century of 
[ 102 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

subjected steam and electricity, has 
finally destroyed the old isolation of 
America. Our daily newspapers, with 
their letters and telegrams from abroad, 
and the floods of utterance which 
otherwise surge upon us from other 
countries, keep us in constant con- 
tact with all manner of radical elo- 
quence uttered pretty much every- 
where under conditions historically dif- 
ferent from those under which we our- 
selves have grown to be what we are. 
The unchecked, increasing flood of im- 
migration meanwhile brings into the 
very midst of us incalculable forces 
which have gathered ominously in 
old-world regions, drenched with class 
hatred. Wherefore, even though the 
trouble may prove only transient, there 
is grumbling and sometimes outcry all 
about us that things as they have been 
shall be suffered to go on only for a 
[ 103 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

little while longer. Then shall come 
the millennium — celestial or infernal, as 
your faith may propound. 

One thing, at least, grows clear. 
During its sturdy growth of what is 
now almost three hundred years, Amer- 
ican democracy — both in its aspect of 
actual government, and in its inner 
and perhaps more deeply character- 
istic aspect of public opinion, or better 
still of national temper, — has honestly 
believed, that it is able to establish and 
to maintain a state of society in which 
all men shall, on the whole, be free to 
win what they deserve, neither more 
nor less. It has honestly endeavoured 
to prove this by its general line of con- 
duct — not only by its deliberate acts, 
but still more by its instinctive utter- 
ances, manifestations and forbearances. 
Public order and private property it has 
sustained and defended. Whatever the 
[ 104 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

vagaries of its unthinking phrases, it 
has never fallen into the folly of fanat- 
ical insistence that everybody must be 
and behave exactly like everybody else. 
Its genuine love of human equality has 
never gone further in practice than to 
maintain, as inviolate as may be, the 
constitutional security of the prizes for 
which the whole world is free to com- 
pete; and to welcome, beyond other 
competitors, those who have begun the 
competition under what have conven- 
tionally been held the disadvantages 
rather than the spurs of obscurity and 
poverty. Yet the end of all its efforts 
seems for the moment to be that one 
great body of the American people be- 
gins petulantly to cry out that another 
class than themselves is insidiously 
coming to enjoy the unavowed abomin- 
ation of privilege, while that vilified 
class is confronted by open and in- 
[105] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

creasingly insistent demands for ad- 
verse and open privilege on the part of 
those who pretend themselves, and 
who doubtless believe themselves, at 
present without it. 

That such privilege, of either kind, 
is already a fatal fact, may certainly be 
doubted; that both aspects of privilege 
are ominously threatening can hardly 
be questioned. Which of the two is 
the more dangerous may well be dis- 
puted. In any such dispute, one im- 
portant circumstance must be can- 
didly admitted. Generally speaking, 
what is believed to be the present priv- 
ilege of the few has resulted from what 
may fairly be called accidents of legis- 
lation. Tariffs, for example, and the 
various developments which have 
aroused so much popular feeling against 
the originally innocent word corpo- 
ration, have been based, from the be- 
[ 106 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

ginning to this day, on the decrees of 
legislative bodies whose avowed pur- 
pose has always been to work for pub- 
lic benefit. Not one such measure has 
ever been urged anywhere as desirable 
for the declared reason that it would 
favour any one class or body of the 
people at the expense of any other. 
The public opinion to which legislation 
has appealed, and with whose demands 
it has at least pretended to comply, has 
inflexibly required lip-loyalty, if noth- 
ing better, to the principle that a cor- 
poration which receives a franchise 
shall receive it as compensation for 
adequately performed public service. A 
protected industry, too, infant or adult, 
it has wished to have protected not 
for the special advantage of capitalists 
who want big dividends but rather for 
the advantage of the whole country, 
thus made more nearly self-suflficient, 
[ 107] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

and sometimes incidentally for the 
maintenance of wages among the work- 
men thus kept busy. The nearest 
approach to avowed class-privilege, in- 
deed, which may be found in the utter- 
ances of protective eloquence, appears 
in its repeated assertion that protective 
legislation may be expected, on the 
whole, to benefit not the rich but the 
poor. You may call this sadly hypo- 
critical, if you choose; better, many 
think, you may call it unintelligent, 
unintentionally canting. At least, it 
implicitly admits that legislation which 
may perhaps result in the increase of 
riches on the part of the few, may 
never plead that fact in justification. 
All legislation must at least purport to 
maintain, with jealous enthusiasm, the 
interests of the public, which means 
the interests of all who constitute 
society, high and low alike. 
[ 108] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

With the privileges now demanded, 
not for the few but for the many, the 
case is startHngly different. The class 
privilege now supposed to persist for 
the benefit of the few, is the result, 
sometimes accidental, and at the very 
worst assumed to have been unfore- 
seen, of legislation avowedly intended 
for public benefit. The class privilege 
now thrusting its predatory hands 
through gaps between the occasionally 
solid planks of political platforms is 
far more bold. It demands legislation 
avowedly beneficial to one class of the 
community, as distinguished from any 
other; and we can hardly deny that 
it has already secured a good deal, nor 
that it seems likely to secure a good 
deal more. The disturbing feature of 
all this is the confidence with which 
it contradicts the traditions of our 
national character. Throughout the 
[ 109] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

past we may incessantly have blun- 
dered into legislative acts which have 
resulted in private benefits rather than 
in public. Until pretty lately, however, 
there has never been a moment when 
an open claim for privilege, as such, 
would not have been passionately re- 
sented by all native American senti- 
ment or opinion. We are going to 
change all that, reformers tell us on all 
sides, about almost everything — prop- 
erty, the courts, whatever else. Inci- 
dentally, they leave us to discover for 
ourselves that among the chief things 
they propose to change is our old na- 
tional belief that men in this world 
should be free to win not their aspira- 
tions but their deserts. 

There might well prove to be a case, 
accordingly, for one who should main- 
tain that, if privilege needs must be, 
the elder phase of privilege — the inci- 

r 110 1 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

dental privilege of the few — is funda- 
mentally less dangerous than the new 
phase of privilege now endeavouring to 
supplant it — the avowed privilege of 
the many. The matter is certainly de- 
batable. The analogy of other social 
disease — of vice, existing on reluctant 
sufferance or formally licensed, as the 
case may be, — would perhaps occur. 
There is room, at least, anyone would 
admit, for honest difference of opinion 
in either case; and, what is more, the 
human mind is not so perfect an engine 
that it must needfully think concerning 
the one precisely as it thinks concern- 
ing the other, or even reason to closely 
similar conclusions concerning any two 
distinct phases of vice. Any such pro- 
cess of discussion about the growth of 
privilege in America at the present day, 
however, would probably end by con- 
vincing us that what is now denounced 
[111 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

as the privilege of the few, and what is 
evidently beginning to be the privilege 
of the unwittingly incorporated many, 
are alike the creatures of legislation, 
itself based — at least, in due sincerity 
of pretense — on public opinion. 

To legislation, therefore, supported 
by public opinion, and endeavouring 
to express genuine popular intentions 
in articulate form, we should naturally 
turn for constitutional relief from the 
disease of privilege which appears to 
threaten us. The chief, or at least the 
fatal symptom of this disease, is fa- 
miliar throughout civilized history. The 
moment privilege grows secure — the 
moment its roots grip deep in the body 
politic — the malignity of its nature is 
made evident by acts of tyranny. Des- 
pot, aristocracy, plutocracy, or labour, 
it is all one. Benevolent or devilish, as 
you may choose to think them, all these 
[ 112] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

privileged classes agree in forbidding 
freedom to those who chance to come 
within their power. Righteousness by 
legislation doubtless resembles right- 
eousness in the sight of the Lord; so 
does righteousness by autocratic com- 
mand. But neither is righteousness of 
heart; nor is either righteousness won 
by struggle through the pitfalls which 
beset democracy, in its earnest course 
from darkness towards the light. 

It is no such righteousness as can be 
imposed on us by any enthroned priv- 
ilege — of the one, of the few, or of the 
many — which should for an instant 
content or console the true spirit of our 
ancestral America. What we have 
really sought from our democratic 
legislation — what we may passionately 
seek from it still — is no manner of tyr- 
anny, however enlightened or benevo- 
lent. It is freedom from all tyranny — 
[ 113] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

freedom to worship God, and freedom 
to help ourselves, as best we may. It 
is the freedom which should make us 
bear, each for himself, the full respon- 
sibility of its grandeur — the freedom 
which brings reward to those who use 
it wisely and strongly, while it proves 
its justice by withholding such reward 
from folly and from weakness. For 
such freedom as this we have placed 
our hopes in American democracy. 
Our hopes run high still. If Amer- 
ican democracy — ^government and pub- 
lic opinion, alike and intermingled, — 
can help us towards it, the faith of our 
fathers — the faith which stays our own — 
will be justified. If American democ- 
racy turn tyrant, after all, implacably 
favouring either the many or the few 
in the tyranny of privilege which both 
seem attempting to exert, that faith 
must perish in the whirlwind, or the 
[ 114 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

morass, of such catastrophe as we have 
never yet known, — the full reality of 
American Revolution. 

By this time, we may well have come 
to feel as if we were deliberately and 
seriously prophetic. Yet we have al- 
ready reminded ourselves that a Rev- 
olution, even though threatening, is by 
no means sure to burst upon us. It is 
a danger, if you will ; it is not yet any- 
thing like a certainty. Healthy organ- 
isms can be exposed to contagion with- 
out catching disease. Between the Rev- 
olution which may perhaps bring our 
present national life to an end, too, and 
the revolutions which have raged else- 
where, there is a clear distinction, not 
often brought to mind. Almost every- 
where else Revolution has declared it- 
self against systems of government and 
of society which we Americans have 
generally agreed with the revolution- 
[ 115 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ists in believing to be outworn relics 
of the past. These we have proudly 
declared that our republic has replaced 
by the system which we have enthu- 
siastically believed destined by some- 
thing like divine grace to control govern- 
ment and society for the present, and 
throughout the future. Some such sys- 
tem as ours, indeed, is that for which 
Revolution elsewhere has devotedly 
striven; the watchword of Revolution 
has been the word democracy. Every- 
where else than among ourselves de- 
mocracy has been something longed 
for but as yet unseen, unrealized, un- 
tested. With us alone it has been an- 
cestral and immemorial. 

An American revolution would there- 
fore mean something far more porten- 
tous than the ominous name of revolu- 
tion might elsewhere imply. Monarch- 
ies, aristocracies, privileges in any elder 
r 116 1 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

shape may be attacked and may fall 
without exciting democracy to despair. 
But these United States where, as no- 
where else, democracy has been long, 
loyally, enthusiastically tested — this 
eldest nation among the world-wide 
democracies of to-day — cannot change 
their nature without revealing to the 
whole onlooking world that democracy 
itself, the dream of the future, is no 
better than the nightmares of the past. 
An American revolution would be a 
confession or a proclamation, as you 
will, that democracy, too, has failed. 

If such revolution ever came — a 
change malignant, violent, irresistible, 
as distinguished from the cautious and 
normal modifications always involved 
in healthy national growth — something 
else than what we have known as de- 
mocracy must ensue. What this may 
be we can only conjecture. Even in its 
[117] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

beginning it might well take either of 
two forms, both familiar throughout 
the records of human troubles and 
shortcomings. The first is that greater 
or less degree of anarchy which we pop- 
ularly describe by the uncomfortable 
name of barbarism. Clashing of classes 
has more than often resulted in political 
and social chaos, where neither public 
order nor private property have been 
able to persist. The barbarism of the 
future, if it come, will doubtless have a 
different aspect from any familiar in the 
barbarisms of the past. It will be less 
picturesque, and in certain aspects, 
more terrible. Your corsair is a finer 
fellow to look at than your anarchist; 
a cutlass or a blunderbuss may be 
faced more coolly than an automatic 
revolver or a bomb. Picturesque or 
squalid, however, heroic or monstrous, 
barbarism is not civilization and never 
[ 118 1 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

can be. Nor is there obvious need that 
a revolutionized America should even 
begin its course by lingering long in 
any such stage. 

For, though hardly more welcome, 
the second, the alternative, form of 
change which may come to us through 
revolution is at least more tolerable. 
The name of it, indeed, is already 
creeping into something like accepted 
familiarity — the name of empire. That 
very word implies its story. An im- 
perator was only a general. Caesar was 
the name of a Roman citizen. Csesar 
Imperator originally meant little more 
than General Grant. But from Cae- 
sar's day to ours absolute sovereigns 
have borne the title of emperor because 
Caesar was a general ; and the name of 
Caesar — in old forms and new — has 
been the title of emperors as well, 
strange to him in blood as you or I. 
[ 119] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Civilization needed force to help it 
endure, even for a while. Barbarism, 
which ensued, needed force to combat 
it. And empire came; and empire 
cherished noble ideals. You shall 
seek far for a nobler than Virgil ut~ 
tered through the lips of old Anchises : 

" Tu regere imperio populos,Roniane, memento ; 
Hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem, 
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos." 

" Remember, Roman, thine imperial charge. 
Thy force shall yoke the warring world with 

peace, 
Sparing the conquered, beating rebels down." 

Even in this thin English paraphrase 
such words as these must stir our ad- 
miration. None ever more gravely, nor 
yet — at least in the marvellous finality 
of Virgil's Latin — more beautifully set 
forth an ideal of civilization. But that 
ideal of civilization has no vestige of 
[ 120 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

the peculiar grace which has made an- 
other such ideal inspiring to America. 
Force is at war with common consent. 
Empire can never be truly at one with 
democracy. 

To the old spirit of our country, 
accordingly, the ideal of empire makes 
faint appeal. More faint still, you will 
agree, we must find any appeal which 
might sporadically be made by the 
ideal of anarchistic barbarism. There 
are men among us, no doubt, particu- 
larly of the class unburdened with the 
cares of property, who would welcome 
abolition of all right to private property 
whatsoever; in all probability, too, 
you would find some here and there 
to whom the maintenance of public 
order presents itself as a superfluous 
vestige of obsolete prejudice. Plain- 
ly stated, however, none of these 
notions can as yet stir the vital national 
[ 121 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

spirit of ancestrally democratic Amer- 
ica. Empire and barbarism, socialism 
and anarchy it still finds unalluring 
when they stand before it naked. That 
it retains to this day so much of the 
strength of its youthful purity, the 
while, does not mean that it can 
forever remain serenely superior to 
what it instinctively feels monstrous. 
Rather it is beginning to endure and 
to pity what it once hated. The days, 
if ever there were such days, when 
our people were placidly content, are 
days long past; and the discontent 
which now finds utterance everywhere 
about us is growing to be tremendous. 
Tremendous, I mean, in the literal 
sense of a word misused so carelessly 
that we are apt to forget its prime sig- 
nificance of something which, whether 
we finally fear it or not, should make 
us pause and tremble. For if the dis- 
[ 122 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

content now rising about us have its 
way, the end may be the end of our 
ancestral democracy — tlie abandon- 
ment of all that our conservative revo- 
lution won us with our independence, 
while we are stru£»:2rlino: amid the con- 
fusion and the violence of the radical 
revolution conceivably to come. 

Some such considerations as we 
have now been pondering on, perhaps 
too long, are hovering nowadays in 
the minds of a good many thoughtful 
Americans. It is probable, to be sure, 
that many of them — perhaps most of 
them — would have fault to find with 
the manner in which, as a man of let- 
ters, I have tried to set the matter forth. 
More than probably, indeed, more 
thoughtful and more learned folks than 
I, if they should have troubled them- 
selves to read my far from authoritative 
statement of opinion beyond its first par- 
[ 123 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

agraphs, would find on each new page 
something which they could compla- 
cently declare a new blunder. The real 
question before us, however, is not one 
of concrete fact, but one of pervasive 
sentiment — a sentiment now revealing 
itself in perplexingly discordant phases. 
That America is deeply loyal to its an- 
cestral tradition of democracy, no one 
can doubt. That it is seething with dis- 
content, inarticulate and articulate 
alike, is equally true; and such dis- 
content means that the results of de- 
mocracy have not realized its aspira- 
tions and its hopes. The matter, like 
any other which a man of letters may 
venture to discuss, is a matter of un- 
formulated feeling, or, in other words, 
of common-sense. 

Common-sense has long been aware 
of almost all the considerations on 
which we have been dwelling together. 
[ 124 ] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

That it has generally acknowledged 
them in terms somewhat different from 
ours only makes its perception of them 
the more evident. And common-sense 
can never fail to discern the folly of mak- 
ing believe that simplified statement 
of anything can be comprehensive. We 
have no more told the whole story than 
the whole story has been told by peo- 
ple who assure us that the landing of 
the Pilgrims or the American Revo- 
lution of 1776 settled everything, once 
for all. Human affairs, like physical and 
living organisms, are compounded of 
good and bad, of health and disease, 
of constructive forces and destructive in- 
termingled. Nothing can forever avert 
the end of man or beast, epoch or na- 
tion, culture or planet. Nothing can 
surely prevent their indefinite persist- 
ence with what vital strength may still 
permeate them. The mere instinct of 
[ 125] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

self-preservation — the most surely 
wholesome, within its limits, known to 
man — bids us all do our best to keep 
ourselves alive, and to keep alive the 
things we care for. This can be done, 
common-sense assures us all, only by 
constant, watchful, yet not enfeeblingly 
meticulous care. The one great folly to 
avoid is the folly of those who still 
cherish the dream that there is any- 
where a panacea. There is no one 
cure for all trouble or disorder — no 
philosopher's stone, no universal solv- 
ent, no fountain of immortal youth; 
but, nevertheless, there is enlightening 
cure for such human folly as honestly 
fancies that there may be. 

Some remedy like this is what the 
threatened danger of revolution any- 
where demands. This the instinctive 
common-sense of our people has long 
ago perceived. The deepest danger 
[ 126] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

which now besets us springs from the 
tremendous, impulsive belief of igno- 
rance and of thoughtlessness that, at 
least for political or social evil, a pan- 
acea exists. The most prudent hope of 
escape from the danger must lie in de- 
termined attack on thoughtlessness and 
ignorance. Those who would avert 
destructive revolution are sure, even 
though they may never have told them- 
selves so in words, that they may do so 
best by showing men to whom the 
dreams and the prophecies of destruc- 
tive revolution appeal how these dreams 
and prophecies conjBict with all the 
sobering history of human experience. 
They are like the predictions of the 
fairy and the dreams of the goose-girl 
that the poor child's legitimate husband 
shall be a royal prince, with heavenly 
blue eyes, and a chariot as golden as his 
curls. She may neglect her geese in 
[ 127 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

consequence, if she will; the line of 
conduct will benefit neither the geese 
nor her own hopes of earthly prosperity 
— that is, unless life turn out to be a 
fairy-tale. For most of us it never will. 
We fancy in childhood that it may. In 
maturity we are sadly sure that no such 
fortune awaits us this side of eternity. 

So much comes to each of us from his 
own experience; but no single experi- 
ence can extend beyond the range, in 
time and in space alike, of a single life- 
time. To prosper, to conduct our- 
selves with any manner of wisdom, and 
still more to avoid the follies which 
should bring disaster on such scale as 
must come with revolution, we need 
more than the experience of any single 
human being can ever teach him. We 
need to learn the lesson stored up by 
humanity, wherein the experience of 
other men than ourselves and of other 
[ 128] 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

times than ours is pitilessly recorded. 
We have begun thus to learn something 
about the laws of nature; what we 
now need to learn is something more of 
the conditions under which men may 
live civilized, and of those which must 
fatally make civilization a mere mem- 
ory. 

We must acquire learning, and im- 
part it, if we would combat the dangers 
of thoughtlessness, of heedlessness, of 
folly. Whether we have told ourselves 
this in so many words or not, we all 
believe it. For on nothing else could 
rest the fervent conviction of our coun- 
try that the safety of the republic — 
which means the persistence of democ- 
racy, the control of privilege, and the 
throttling of revolution — lies to-day in 
popular education. 



[ 129 ] 



Ill 

OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 



In substance, this paper was originally given as a Com- 
mencement Address at Haverford College, in June, 1904, It 
was published in the North American ^Review for September, 
1904 ; and I beg to acknowledge the kindness of the editors 
who permit its reappearance. 

[131] 



Ill 

OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

If the considerations at which we have 
glanced together appeal to common- 
sense, we have clearly come to a point 
where common-sense would counsel us 
to inquire something about American 
education in its present state. Privilege 
we have found to be insidiously threat- 
ening — particularly in the new form, 
sanctioned by so much philanthropic 
sentiment, which is now beginning to 
assert itself in favour of those w ho have 
least proved themselves to deserve it, 
namely, the irresponsible. What the 
growth of such privilege threatens us 
with is revolution, not only in govern- 
ment but still more seriously in national 
[ 133] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

temper. Barbarism or imperialism, 
unwelcome as either would be, seem, on 
the whole, less abhorrent to our elder 
traditions than the senile decay of our 
immemorial conviction that American 
democracy may be trusted to maintain 
a society where each man shall be free 
to win not his aspirations but his de- 
serts. And the remedy now held sov- 
ereign against these dangers we have 
found to be popular education. 

In view of this, the experience of any 
one who has been much concerned with 
education in America may have a cer- 
tain value. No such experience can be 
universal. None, honestly set forth, 
can be quite insignificant. At worst, it 
will show how good, or how faulty, 
American education now appears to 
be, when regarded from one definite 
point of view. And, of all possible 
points of view, none, I think, can be 
[ 134 ] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

much more definite than that of the goal 
towards which the aspirations of those 
Americans who strive for the highest 
education within their reach are still 
constantly tending — namely, our univer- 
sities. At our larger and older univer- 
sities, to be sure, we are incessantly 
reminded of our own isolation. For 
every man who comes within our vision, 
we are told, there are thousands who 
never get near our horizon. Our best 
answer is that, for all this truth, the few 
who come to us have emerged from the 
many; and therefore that it is not 
quite unfair to form some opinion of the 
many from the traces of former environ- 
ment common to almost all who have 
emerged. What is more, at least 
throughout our Eastern Universities, 
so many students, in various stages 
of culture, present themselves from all 
over the country that any prolonged 
[ 135 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

experience of teaching at Harvard or 
Yale, at Princeton or Columbia — to go 
no further — can hardly fail to make 
some general impressions worth atten- 
tion on any observer originally blessed, 
as we all happily believe ourselves to 
be blessed, with the grace of common- 
sense. 

I shall make no further apology for 
proceeding to set forth, as clearly as I 
can, certain opinions concerning the 
safeguard of our country, American 
education, forced on me during twenty- 
eight years of service as a teacher at 
Harvard. For a good many of these 
years I chanced to be a member of a 
committee no longer in existence, the 
Committee on Admission from other 
Colleges. The principal duty of this 
committee, now absorbed by one which 
has in charge all questions of admission 
to college, was to scrutinize, with what 
[136] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

care proved possible, degrees or other 
certificates presented as credentials by 
men who, after studying at some other 
institution of the higher learning, de- 
sired to become candidates for degrees 
at Harvard. I have no right to speak 
for any of my colleagues, past or pres- 
ent. That wise man who is president 
of Harvard College always requests us 
to make clear in public utterances that 
no Harvard man's opinion may ever 
pretend to more authority than hap- 
pens to reside in the particular Har- 
vard man who utters it. With this res- 
ervation, however, — that, throughout 
this discussion, I have neither the right 
nor the wish to implicate anybody else, 
— I have no hesitation in saying that 
my experience as a committee-man 
long ago led me to views of American 
education less complacent than those 
which now seem general. For, very 
[137] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

clearly, there are few colleges in Amer- 
ica from which we were not sometimes 
— I had almost said often — confronted 
with Bachelors of Arts who seemed vir- 
tually uneducated. They always sup- 
posed themselves educated, the while; 
and, what is more, the fact that they 
possessed degrees proved that numer- 
ous academic authorities officially de- 
clared these far from accomplished 
persons to be such as could satisfac- 
torily pass the tests which are intended 
to protect the standard of education in 
this country. Naturally, I was driven 
to ask myself, now and again, what on 
earth that word "education" means. 

The answer was less obvious than 
the question. The word is so familiar 
nowadays that we rarely stop to think 
how vaguely it is generally used. But, 
even though many of us may have 
framed something like definitions of it 
[ 138 1 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

for ourselves, I doubt whether any of us 
could at present venture to define it with 
much hope that his definition would 
command general assent. For the mo- 
ment, accordingly, I shall not try to 
define it; I shall use it as vaguely as 
we are apt to hear it used every day of 
our lives. There is a fact about that 
use which, for our purposes, is far more 
important than any definition could be. 
Undefined and indefinite though it be, 
the word ''education" is just now a 
magic one; from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific it is the most potent with which 
you can conjure money out of public 
chests or private pockets. Let social 
troubles declare themselves anywhere, 
— lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigra- 
tion, racial controversies, privilege, 
revolution, whatever you may chance 
to hold most threatening, — and we are 
gravely assured on every side that 
[ 139] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

nothing but education can preserve 
our coming generations from destruc- 
tion. What is more, as a people we 
listen credulously to these assurances. 
We are told, and we believe, and we 
evince magnificent faith in our belief, 
that our national salvation must de- 
pend on education. 

Whoever has travelled much in both 
Europe and America must have plenty 
of visual memories to illustrate the 
present consequences of this national 
conviction of ours. Among the most 
dominant architectural monuments of 
the Old World are the great churches 
and religious houses everywhere erected 
throughout the Christian centuries by 
vast grants and gifts. They imply the 
abiding faith throughout old Europe 
that salvation could best be assured by 
unstinting generosity to the Church, 
which represented divine authority on 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

earth. Sometimes, these structures 
were founded by corporate bodies — 
cities, guilds, whatever else, — who be- 
lieved that special civility to divinity 
might win them special heavenly favour. 
Sometimes, they were founded by pri- 
vate sinners of fortune, who had been 
authoritatively assured that such foun- 
dations and monuments might have 
happy influence on the chances of their 
jeopardized souls. There were noble 
ideals beneath it all no doubt; but 
these noble ideals were complicated 
and obscured by various less admirable 
states of mind and feeling. The en- 
lightened temper of our own age and 
country discerns these inferior motives 
more distinctly than the higher; and 
it has long been disposed to group them 
under the conveniently indefinite head- 
ing of '* mediaeval superstition." 

In contrast to the beautiful embodi- 
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ments of such superstition which still 
make dreamily romantic so many of the 
towns and the landscapes of Europe, 
this surging new country of ours, proud 
of its enlightenment, — I know not 
whether our common school geogra- 
phies still describe Europe as ''civil- 
ized" and republican America as "en- 
lightened," — can begin to point to 
architectural phenomena of widely dif- 
ferent character and purpose. In most 
of our towns and cities, particularly 
as you travel westward, the most 
stately and impressive structures are 
not churches or religious houses. They 
are rather the abiding places of schools, 
and colleges, and public libraries, freely 
devoted to the education of everybody. 
These structures, to be sure, lack the 
alluring beauty of romantic fancy; but 
they are the best tokens which the mu- 
nificence of our country could give that 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

our national faith is unshaken. On 
education, we evidently believe, and on 
education alone, our national salvation 
depends. Sometimes, our temples of 
education have been founded by pub- 
lic bodies, from Congress itself to town 
meetings, who still seem unwaveringly 
confident that, however lax they may 
be about other things, faithful devotion 
to the interests of education will go far 
to atone for their errors. Sometimes, 
these sanctuaries of our national cult 
have been founded by private benefac- 
tors, whose motives occasionally seem 
analogous to those which prompted the 
pious munificences of mediaeval sin- 
ners. For, ask any American what we 
shall do to be saved, and, if he speak 
his mind, he will probably bid us edu- 
cate our fellow men. 

In all this, when one stops to con- 
sider, there is a somewhat disturbing 
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likeness to the superstition which nour- 
ished the now fading splendours of re- 
ligious foundations throughout medi- 
seval Europe. The men who laid these 
foundations never knew precisely what 
they were going to accomplish. As- 
sured, however, that religious founda- 
tions would at once work wonders and 
reflect inestimable credit on founders, 
they gave and gave, until the Church 
waxed fatter than the laity. Wherefore, 
at last, as Protestant tradition has kept 
busily in mind, the great good which 
ensued from endowments of the Church 
began to glow very feebly before lay 
eyes in general. The educational en- 
thusiasm which now possesses our free 
and enlightened country does not pre- 
sent so marked a contrast to all this 
as might have been comfortably ex- 
pected. When we begin to inquire, we 
presently discover that Americans in 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

general do not know exactly what edu- 
cation is; and, furthermore, that they 
have extremely nebulous ideas of ex- 
actly what it can accomplish. They 
are content with the assurance that in 
education lies salvation. They be- 
lieve so. They give and give, accord- 
ingly, with what looks very like blind 
faith, that they may thus justify those 
phases of themselves which most need 
justification. So far, no doubt, our in- 
stitutions of learning have not waxed 
fat enough to excite much lay envy; 
yet, even already, American education 
is beginning to develop symptoms like 
some among those which aroused lay 
hostility to the mediaeval Church. Our 
legislatures, for example, show signs of 
getting troublesome about the occa- 
sional freedom from taxation enjoyed by 
universities or museums, whose endow- 
ments, however much increased, never 
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prove enough for their professed needs. 
Our comic papers have long found 
highly available many trite jests about 
the follies and the uselessness of college 
boys, and sometimes even of college 
girls; and I do not see how any one 
can doubt that American society will 
soon be obviously encumbered with 
certain vast, if respectable, mendicant 
orders of scholars — such as the male 
and the female Doctors of Philosophy. 
The conclusion to which this line of 
thought irresistibly leads is disturbing. 
It has so often been my temperamental 
misfortune to express myself in a man- 
ner which has appeared frivolous that 
I may perhaps be pardoned for ex- 
plicitly setting down what this conclu- 
sion at first meant to me. I have never 
in my life been more deeply stirred 
than when I finally realized what I 
have just been trying to explain: 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

namely, that, in many aspects, the 
present mood of our country concern- 
ing education is neither more nor less 
than a mood of blind mediaeval super- 
stition. 

My first impulse from that discovery 
was one of revulsion, of recoil. I felt 
utterly iconoclastic, like those seven- 
teenth-century Puritans who defiled 
and defaced the glories of the English 
cathedrals; or like Emerson, proclaim- 
ing with all his serene insolence to what 
still held itself his Christian congrega- 
tion that, for lack of personal interest in 
such ceremony, he would no longer 
comfort the faithful with the Sacra- 
ment of the Body and Blood of Christ. 
It was the memory of such honest 
iconoclasms as these which checked my 
iconoclastic impulse. Christianity is 
none the less a spiritual force because, 
now and again, its spirit has become 

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enshrouded in a mist of symbols too 
thick for ordinary human sight to pene- 
trate. Nor are these symbols them- 
selves to be disdained for the mere 
reason that many honest people can 
discern in them nothing better than 
idols. The fact that truth is some- 
times dimmed by superstition no more 
means that truth is nowhere than the 
evanescent fogs of our own New Eng- 
land seaboard mean that there is no 
sun. Rather, indeed, we should re- 
member that there is need of vital sun- 
shine to raise them. 

Thus I began to ask myself what 
living truth underlies that educational 
faith of ours which, on the surface, 
looks so densely superstitious. And 
here I could find little help in listening 
to the apostles of the hour. I was 
trained, you see, — so far as I was 
trained at all, — when Harvard was still 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

something like an orthodox school of 
old-fashioned learning. That training 
made me, so far as it made me any- 
thing, not a technical scholar, and still 
less a man of science, but only a man 
of letters. Had I been a scholar, in the 
modern acceptation of the term, or a 
man of science, I might, perhaps, have 
discerned in the vagaries of educational 
literature something else than a mere 
man of letters can find there. It is 
possible, conceivably it is more than 
possible, that modern pedagogics may 
be struggling out of darkness into some 
more divine light than has been vouch- 
safed us yet. It is equally possible that 
mere men of letters may be only 
sporadic survivals of a past epoch, soon 
to be extinct. But, all the while, it is 
not possible to deny that, so far, the 
utterances of our pedagogic contem- 
poraries present themselves, to men of 
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letters who are fortunate or luckless 
enough to linger in the twilight, as 
more archaic, more primally elementary 
than our own. The writings of many 
authorities on education seem to us 
like the fanatical proclamations of over- 
confident political reformers, vaunting 
untested panaceas. The writings of 
others seem like the alchemic gropings 
of those old pretenders to science who 
never got beyond explosive experi- 
ments in search of the Philosopher's 
Stone. At best, the confusion of 
tongues bespeaks an intellectual Babel. 
As a man of letters, bewildered by 
such environment, I was consequently 
impelled to seek for myself what truth 
this bewilderment might conceal. Or, 
better, I was wholesomely forced to 
give myself the clearest account I 
could of how the truth, which firmly 
warrants our national faith in educa- 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

tion, could be perceived by eyes like 
mine. One thing was soon evident; 
there are solid historical facts on which 
that national faith, however super- 
stitious its vagaries, may justly and 
firmly be based. 

Take a single example. From our 
national beginnings, the history of our 
country has involved an experiment in 
democracy greater in scale and in scope 
than any previously attempted. One 
difference between this and elder sys- 
tems of polity is that the elder gave fac- 
titious importance to certain distinc- 
tions of rank, which we discarded, 
once for all. Manifestly these distinc- 
tions and the motives which they 
excited had not always proved able to 
place deserving men in positions of 
public control. One of our fervent 
national hopes was that unprecedented 
freedom of suffrage might tend to de- 
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velop leaders who should really be 
worthy and able. Now, a familiar fact, 
obvious to anybody, is that, throughout 
the country, our first century of national 
experiment gave preponderant promi- 
nence and power to the profession of 
the law. An equally obvious fact is 
that, among American professions and 
occupations during the nineteenth cen- 
tury, that of the law was most likely 
to contain men who had availed them- 
selves of every educational opportunity 
within their reach. It is hardly exces- 
sive to say that throughout the nine- 
teenth century the American bar proved 
itself a true intellectual aristocracy. In 
free competition, it forced itself to the 
fore; it asserted and justified its recog- 
nized leadership. And the secret of its 
superiority seemed to lie partly, even 
greatly, in the fact that everywhere, 
among other men otherwise his equals, 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

an American lawyer had generally had 
the advantage of more thorough edu- 
cation. This is only one conspicuous 
example of a clear fact; quite apart 
from what some people call higher 
considerations, the practical experience 
of our American republic has tended to 
show, in a thousand ways, that educa- 
tion has been practically worth while. 
Throughout America, to the present 
time, educated men have had a pal- 
pable advantage in any struggle for 
political or social existence. 

Yet, when one came to examine the 
actual education which these successful 
persons had enjoyed, it seemed mon- 
strously unreasonable. It was based 
on the traditions of the Renaissance in 
Europe; and these traditions assumed 
that whoever was ever to know any- 
thing must begin by devoting labouri- 
ous years, which he should never see 
[153] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

again, to the acquisition of a little Latin, 
and less Greek, and less mathematics 
still. After this painful initiation, and 
only after it, he might devote himself 
to so much technical study of his chosen 
subject or profession as circumstances 
should permit. The system certainly 
worked; to prove that, you have only 
to open those catalogues of New Eng- 
land Colleges which record the names 
of men who took the Bachelor's degree 
between 1800 and 1850. But, plainly 
stated, the system looked even more 
repugnant to plain common-sense than 
it was efficacious. 

What is more, these finished masters 
of our traditional education were not 
usually expert in the matters which 
they had pretended to study. Even if 
they had been able to read the classical 
languages easily and to apply algebraic 
processes to the question of how to make 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

both ends meet, there might well have 
remained in the mind of any critical 
inquirer a question as to whether the 
energy involved in such acquisitions 
might not have been better directed. 
But, after years of work in classics, 
most college graduates — at least among 
such as ever came to my knowledge — 
were unable to make anything out of a 
Greek page or a Latin which they had 
not studied up for purposes of exami- 
nation ; and in mathematics, their avail- 
able attainment, as a rule, demonstra- 
bly stopped short with long division. 
This helplessness certainly seemed pre- 
posterous, not only to people who had 
lacked the benefits of the higher edu- 
cation for which the public was called 
on to pay rapidly increasing sums of 
money, but also to people who had 
experienced the disheartening dulness 
of it. Education, everybody agreed, 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

was a good thing; yet to almost every- 
body its condition seemed unintelligent 
and, at best, unreasonable. 

Obviously, this state of affairs needed 
reform. Obviously, a process which, 
even in an unreasonable state, was so 
generally efficient, might be expected to 
work miracles if once duly rationalized. 
For example, if years of reluctant 
struggle with Latin grammar could be 
replaced by an equal amount of intelli- 
gent study devoted to one's own lan- 
guage, it would seem to follow that the 
English language would before long be 
handled by graduates of American 
schools and colleges in a manner 
evidently better than any previously 
known or imagined. Or, if unintelli- 
gent recitation of geometrical proposi- 
tions could give place to field study of 
the rocks and the wild-flowers of one's 
own neighbourhood, the children of 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

the future would not only become alert 
observers of natural phenomena, but 
incidentally they would find their school 
hours — hours which had been so dreary 
in our time — changed to hours which 
should glow heavenly, irradiating a 
finally beautiful and intelligible earth. 
Above all, if there were any point con- 
cerning which the temper of educa- 
tional reformers tended to agree, it was 
this : if pupils in the past had gained so 
much from unintelligent study of mat- 
ters which did not interest them, and 
which, in any event, were of no practi- 
cal use, there could be no question that 
pupils in the future must gain incal- 
culably more from intelligent study of 
matters inherently interesting and un- 
deniably useful. 

The whole new system of education, 
from a child's first school to a man's 
last degree, is based on this principle, 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

which we may call the principle of the 
kindergarten — not literally, of course, 
but as a matter of general temper. 
You must try to find out just what 
everybody likes best, and then help 
him to do it as kindly as you can. 
You must interfere with him as little 
as may be — only when his impulses 
take a form which threatens to dam- 
age somebody else. Incidentally, if 
you can induce him, from early child- 
hood, to take pleasure in handiwork, 
— in making something ornamental 
or useful, — so much the better. And, 
particularly, whatever he is about, he 
should be incited to diligence not by 
the selfish spur of competition, or by 
the degrading fear of a spanking, but 
by the stimulus of delight in work, 
or, better still, by the encouragement of 
altruistic enthusiasm, such as some- 
times gladdens the birthday breakfast- 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

table of papa with a rather oily paper- 
cutter, sand-papered by the diligent 
hands of baby. 

There can be little question that the 
new education, in all its stages, has 
turned out far more paper-cutters and 
the like than the old ever came near 
bringing into the light. In which par- 
able we may include, once for all, its 
achievements in the way of technical 
and special training. The paper-cut- 
ters in question certainly serve a pleas- 
ant domestic purpose, and they do no 
harm; they are not of such quality as 
seriously to affect the business of those 
who deal in the commercial article. 
Under the older system, on the other 
hand, hardly anybody could make 
paper-cutters at all. But, granting this, 
there does arise a question as to whether 
this making of paper-cutters, in an at- 
mosphere suffused with sentimental 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

kindness, is proving itself, on the whole, 
a more efficient educational process 
than the less reasonable one which its 
sweet reasonableness is now tending to 
uproot and to supplant. 

Such a question, I suppose, each of 
us must answer for himself. The peda- 
gogues — and their noble army is at 
present innumerable — hold that, if the 
new system is not yet always and ob- 
viously superior in its results, it ought 
to be, and therefore that in due time it 
will be. The whole thing looks im- 
pressive in their habitual reading — 
namely, in educational reports. Wher- 
ever educational facts do not come 
within the range of your own experi- 
ence, indeed, you will be at pains to re- 
sist the assumption that this new edu- 
cation is rapidly approaching excellence. 
All the assumption in the world, how- 
ever, cannot belie experience; and I 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

am much deceived if my experience at 
Harvard, during the past eight and 
twenty years, is widely different from 
that which must come to teachers at 
any American college nowadays. 

In the first place, the new methods 
and the new subjects have not brought 
about a higher standard of attainment. 
English, for example, is directly taught 
at schools a great deal more than it used 
to be, and taught, furthermore, in what 
are believed to be freshly vital ways. 
But, so far as I can see, the boys who 
come to college, after due subjection to 
this invigourating experience, know 
their English hardly as well as the 
boys of my time knew their Latin, — 
certainly no better. In brief, human 
nature remains just as human as ever; 
and, no matter what they study, or how, 
human children will rarely learn a bit 
more than they can help. Teachers of 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

pedagogics have much to say about de- 
light in work. For my part, I begin to 
think that I was right in childhood, 
when I held such delight to be prima 
facie evidence that a boy needed medi- 
cine. 

Again, and what is far more serious, 
boys fitted for college at schools where 
the new education has supplanted the 
old, seem to me, almost year by year, 
when they get to college, flabbier and 
flabbier in mind. I remember a talk 
with a Harvard sophomore a few years 
ago which will illustrate what I mean. 
He was a pleasantly disposed boy, as 
Harvard sophomores are apt to be; 
and, finding himself unexpectedly 
aware that his mind lacked cultivation, 
he did me the honour to inquire how I 
thought he might best proceed to cul- 
tivate it. I answered that his first busi- 
ness should be to take in hand some 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

hard and solid subject, and therewith 
to plough out the traces of the kinder- 
garten. The look of wonder in his big 
brown eyes lingers with me still. How 
on earth did I know, he asked, that he 
had been to a kindergarten at all ? I 
doubt whether I quite succeeded in 
explaining myself. I had recognized 
the fact from his inability to keep his 
attention fixed, for any perceptible 
length of time, on anything which did 
not happen to excite his interest; and 
my explanation appeared not to do so. 
His culture, I regret to say, seemed 
little improved when I met him last, 
about to proceed to our own degree of 
Bachelor of Arts. The new education 
had him fairly in its clutches, and the 
buffets of life had not yet begun to 
loosen them. 

Again still, the methods approved by 
the new education are sometimes star- 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

tling: not very long ago, for example, 
I discovered, in the Freshman Class at 
Harvard, a student, of fairly robust 
mental quality, who found great trouble 
in alphabetically sorting some hun- 
dred or two manuscripts, endorsed with 
the names of the writers. A few ques- 
tions revealed the cause of his per- 
plexity. He had been taught at school 
to read and to write and to cipher flu- 
ently; but he had never been called 
upon to learn the alphabet. The order 
of the letters therein had impressed his 
school teachers as arbitrary, and there- 
fore not reasonable; and, desiring to be 
purely reasonable, these teachers had 
presented the twenty-six letters to him 
as independent phonetic symbols, of 
which the meaning was to be inferred 
from observation of them as they ap- 
peared in various words. He could 
spell, I subsequently discovered, rather 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

better than I should have expected. 
But what use he could make of a dic- 
tionary, the Lord alone knows. After 
all, I suppose, the order of words in dic- 
tionaries may perhaps be held, by rea- 
sonable pedagogues, irrationally and 
obsoletely arbitrary. An ideally digested 
system of knowledge should be organic 
and consecutive. 

It was not so in our time. There can 
hardly be alive to-day an educated 
man of fifty who will not shudder when 
he remembers how many benumbing 
youthful hours he had to pass over the 
abhorrent pages of Andrews, or of 
Liddell and Scott, — more repellent, if 
possible, than those other horrors, the 
Latin and the Greek Grammars, which 
the methods of the olden time inter- 
posed between the vital meaning of 
classical literature and any faithful 
schoolboy. No one ever recoiled from 
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THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

that drudgery more rebelliously than I; 
few, I think, can have condemned it 
much more freely. Through many 
years, extending far into my hfe as a 
college teacher, I did not cease to resent 
the fact that, after ten honest years of 
work with Latin, and six or eight with 
Greek, I put those studies despairingly 
aside, unable to read a page in either 
language. The same was generally 
true of my friends and classmates. For 
years, it seemed, we had been victims 
of an educational superstition far more 
blind than any which has succeeded it. 
Yet now that the results of what pretend 
to be more enlightened methods are 
slowly defining themselves, I begin to 
wonder whether, evil as our fate was, 
the fate of those who have followed us 
be not, in a chaotic way of its own, 
more evil still. We were ill educated, 
no doubt; but, from my point of view 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

as a college teacher, the younger genera- 
tions often seem hardly educated at all. 
And here I find myself using the 
term ''education" with a meaning 
more nearly precise than was the case 
before. Education is a matter partly of 
information and partly of training. 
The latter phase of it seems to me the 
more important. A well-educated man 
distinguishes himself from an unedu- 
cated one chiefly because, for general 
purposes, his faculties are better under 
his control. Educated people, in short, 
when confronted with new or unex- 
pected problems, can generally use their 
wits better than those who are uned- 
ucated. Here we are on purely practical 
ground. The simple question becomes 
one of plain fact, not of prejudice. 
What kind of education makes people 
most efficient for general purposes ? 
Honestly answering this, though I am 
[ 167] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

myself professor of a radical and prac- 
tical subject, I am bound to say that 
purely practical considerations go far 
to justify the old system of classics and 
mathematics, in comparison with any- 
thing newer. 

Though I cannot be sure that any- 
body else would agree with me through- 
out, I find some warrant for this opin- 
ion when I recall a recurrent discussion 
in the Harvard faculty. At various 
times, the requirements for admission 
to Harvard College have been altered, 
in the interest of educational reform. 
On each of these occasions, our more 
radical colleagues have desired that 
our department of English should pro- 
pose, as a subject for admission, what 
they called Advanced English, — that is, 
a plan for the study of English in schools 
which should fairly be held equivalent 
to advanced study of the classics or 
[ 168] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

of mathematics, and which might con- 
sequently be put forward as a complete 
alternative for one or the other. On 
each of these occasions, our depart- 
ment of English has unanimously de- 
clined to propose any such thing. And 
our ground, as I have understood it, 
has been that we could not conceive 
how any plan for the study of English 
in schools could be anything like an 
educational equivalent for the ad- 
vanced studies which our radical col- 
leagues desired Advanced English to 
supplant. In other words, the profes- 
sors of English at Harvard have unan- 
imously believed that a man who is 
going seriously to study English at 
college may best prepare himself for 
this chosen work by a severe prelimi- 
nary training in the studies which have 
regularly preceded the study of Eng- 
lish throughout the past. 
[169] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

We have been reproached, accord- 
ingly, as not believing in our own sub- 
ject; we have been told that we were 
blinded by outworn superstition. Is 
there any mystic power, we have been 
asked, in the fetiches of the schools? 
Can unmeaning words, just because 
they chance to be in Greek or in Latin, 
work miracles ? Are we so mediaeval as 
to bow awe-stricken before a scholastic 
Abracadabra ? Questions like that are 
really staggering. What is more, our 
classical and mathematical colleagues 
have helped us less than we might have 
hoped towards the finding of an answer 
to them. They have seemed content to 
repeat orthodox formulas about the 
"humanities"; and the formulas of 
orthodoxy, highly edifying to the faith- 
ful, give small comfort to sceptics. 
Yet the fact remains that no orthodoxy 
can remain vital through the centuries 
[170] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

unless its formulas enfold some truth 
which must give us pause. And what 
the truth is which made the elder 
training so much more efficient than 
the new is beginning, at least for me, 
to shine clear. 

The practical aim of a general edu- 
cation, I have said, is s^jch training as 
shall enable a man to devote his Acui- 
ties intently to matters which of them- 
selves do not interest him. The power 
which enables a man to do so is ob- 
viously the power of voluntary, as dis- 
tinguished from spontaneous, atten- 
tion. Any one, for example, can read 
the items in a newspaper. With no 
more interruption than occasional skip- 
ping, any one can read a novel which 
'nterests him. Any one can keep his 
wits fixed on a well-composed play, 
particularly if the performers possess 
the advantage of personal attraction. 
[171] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

But the moment anything be long or 
dull — sermon, poem, or problem, it is 
all one — only those can keep their wits 
from wandering who have somehow 
learned to control them. In other 
words, whatever interests people com- 
mands their spontaneous attention, and 
accordingly such power of concentra- 
tion as is naturally theirs. But if a man 
is to make anything whatever out of a 
matter which does not interest him, he 
must concentrate his powers on it by a 
strenuous act of attention controlled by 
the full power of his will. 

It is precisely this faculty of volun- 
tary attention which education, in the 
broadest sense, can most surely culti- 
vate. The fact that it can do so is pat- 
ent, when you consider what education 
has actually done. The faculty of vol- 
untary attention, for example, obvi- 
ously distinguished the American law- 
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OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

yers of the nineteenth century from their 
fellow citizens, of whom they proved 
themselves able to take the lead. That 
faculty clearly distinguished the col- 
lege students of thirty years ago from 
the flabbier students of to-day. And 
that faculty, I believe, these various 
masters of it, big and little, whom we 
may fairly assume to be typical, gained 
largely from that elder system of edu- 
cation to which they had been forced 
to submit. Now no one, I equally be- 
lieve, can gain it to anything like the 
same degree from methods as yet de- 
vised by apostles of the kindergarten. 
The elder education, to be sure, cul- 
tivated voluntary attention, not be- 
cause it specifically insisted that pupils 
should unintelligently devote tedious 
years to grammars and dictionaries of 
Latin and Greek, or to lifeless variants 
of the extinct vitality of Euclid; but, 
[ 173] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

unknowingly, it cultivated the faculty 
well. Through daily hours, through- 
out all their youthful years, it com- 
pelled boys, in spite of every human 
reluctance, to fix their attention on 
matters which, of themselves, could 
never have held attention for five min- 
utes together. 

No doubt, plenty of subjects other 
than classics or mathematics could 
have been made to serve this purpose 
and could be made to serve it now. You 
can hardly imagine a subject, essen- 
tially uninteresting, which would not 
reward plodding work with a similar 
result — with substantial ignorance of 
the matter studied, but with increas- 
ingly and lastingly muscular power of 
voluntary attention. The only pecul- 
iar virtue which I can feel sure to per- 
sist in the traditional subjects comes 
directly from the accident that they are 
[ 174] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

traditional. As a natural consequence, 
they have acquired, through the cen- 
turies, a degree of precision not yet at- 
tained by their rivals. Even unsympa- 
thetic and unintelligent teachers can, 
therefore, keep closer watch of them. 
If the attention of boys who study clas- 
sics or mathematics begins to wander, 
it can instantly be detected as vagrant. 
If it errs, its errors can swiftly and cer- 
tainly be corrected. And the very fact 
that the classical languages are dead, 
and that the abstractions of mathe- 
matics must generally seem repellently 
lifeless, is part of the secret of their 
educational vitality. Of late years, it 
has often been supposed that training 
in natural science would do more for 
the power of voluntary attention, and 
therefore would have a higher educa- 
tional value, than training in the old 
humanities. So far as my observation 
[175] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

has gone, this has not yet proved the 
case. And one reason why it has not, 
I am disposed to think, is because the 
natural sciences are apt nowadays to 
prove a shade too interesting. In the 
end, accordingly, like other alluring 
things, they often excite an attention 
more nearly spontaneous than volun- 
tary. If so, the study of them would 
inevitably result rather in technical in- 
formation and habitual aptitude of a 
special kind, than in any broad general 
training, available for other service than 
that immediately concerned. 

The classics and mathematics have 
doubtless been tyrannical; what is 
worse, they have been supercilious. 
There can be little doubt that the day 
of their dominance is past, and that 
resentment of their pretensions will 
long blind the educational authorities 
of our democratic countrv and age to 
[ 176] 



OUR NATIONAL SUPERSTITION 

the real nature of their educational 
potency. Of all educational supersti- 
tions, we may freely admit, none is 
more instantly apparent than that 
which worships the classics and math- 
ematics as idols. And yet the newer 
educational superstition, which bows 
the knee to pedagogics, is beginning 
to seem more mischievously idolatrous 
still. For behind the dethroned idols 
there was an orthodox truth, not yet 
discernible behind the new; and the 
education which resulted from the 
elder system had a virtue which must 
somehow be revived, if the new is to 
justify the magnificent and generous 
faith of our still youthful America. No 
education, I have tried to show, can 
serve much practical purpose, in prep- 
aration for the perplexing diversities 
of practical life, unless, throughout the 
years of youthful flexibility, it delib- 
[ 177 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

erately and persistently train that facul- 
ty of voluntary attention which only in 
maturity should be suffered to range 
among the matters of its choice or of 
its incidental duty. Any education, 
on the other hand, which does this 
work, is a priceless boon, not only to 
those who have won it, but to the 
country of which they are citizens. 
The instinct of our people is right, after 
all. To check the growth of privilege, 
high and low, and to avert the danger 
of revolution, popular education, prop- 
erly directed, can probably help us 
more than anything else. 



t 178] 



IV 
OF EDUCATION 



In substance, this reproduces an address given to the 
Graduate Club of Harvard University, in May, 1908. 

[ 179] 



IV 

OF EDUCATION 

Superstition is faith run wild; faith 
renewed and strengthened may spring 
from the pruning of it. If man were 
altogether a rational being, his instru- 
ment of pruning would obviously be 
reason. He used it boldly during 
the last years of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and the experiment revealed his 
unlucky limitations. For better or for 
worse, we must sadly admit, man is not 
yet wholly and supremely rational; at 
his best he is only sensible. Wherefore, 
if he would 'rationally bring superstition 
back to the state of efficacious faith, 
he must content himself with the rough 
and ready tool of common-sense. When 
[181] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

a man of letters, however far from con- 
fident, is confronted with such a ques- 
tion as that before us now, he may 
accordingly console himself with the 
assurance that he has as good hope as 
anybody else of helping towards an an- 
swer to it. After trying his best to 
show what seems to be the matter, and 
what can be done about it, he may, very 
likely, do little good, but he can do no 
particular harm. Even though he stray 
into palpable nonsense, good may come 
from his efforts. Sensible people, if they 
attend to him at all, may find the po- 
tency of their sense excited to fresh 
vigour by their consequent impulse to- 
wards righteous contradiction. 

We are living, it seems, in a world 
where privilege for the irresponsible is 
threatening to replace the outworn 
privileges of the responsible. The 
growth of privilege, in any form, has 
[ 182 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

resulted, throughout the past, in revolu- 
tion, which incidentally begins its rav- 
ages by playing the devil with the 
privilege itself. Nobody but those who 
take mischievous delight in destruc- 
tion — not even the privileged them- 
selves, when they stop to think — can 
be assumed to desire either that priv- 
ilege wax fat or that revolution ensue. 
Sane folks wish civilization to persist, 
with public order and private property. 
To sustain these they confidently rely 
on popular education. So far, so good, 
we comfortably feel in this country ; we 
have popular education, enough and 
to spare. Yet, when we come to look 
our popular education in the face, it 
proves at this moment so far from 
satisfactory that, at least from the 
point of view of an American univer- 
sity, it looks hardly better than chaotic. 
The story of disenchantment, in- 
[ 183] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

deed, does not end here. Not only 
among our free and democratic selves, 
but all over the world, the traditional 
methods and systems of education 
have been tried and found wanting. 
Though they may nowhere have done 
much, if any, public harm, they have 
come far from doing enough good, 
public or private, to justify the expense 
of energy and of means which they 
have demanded from society in general. 
Society in general has consequently 
made up its mind to change all that. 
New men and new methods, new ideals 
and new subjects, have cropped up 
everywhere. Old-fashioned university 
people begin to feel as if enthusiastic 
chaos had invaded their placid seats of 
numb and obsolete order. This alone 
would be enough to disturb some of 
us. Our dismay grows the greater 
when we begin to perceive, particularly 
[ 184] 



OF EDUCATION 

in other countries than our own, that 
the results of popular education, high 
and low, are not such as to confirm our 
complacent assumption that education 
is an essentially conservative process. 
The people who make the most alarming 
trouble are not the densely ignorant; 
they are rather the half-trained. Mobs 
are not invariably stirred to their mis- 
chief by demagogic labourers or illumi- 
nated petty shopkeepers; sometimes 
we find them straggling after men who 
have honestly won the peaceful titles of 
doctor and professor. There is a case 
for those who should maintain that ed- 
ucation is proving itself not a sedative 
of revolution, but rather an irritant. 

In moods like this, one's instant im- 
pulse is reactionary ; and were reaction 
feasible the impulse would sometimes 
be overwhelming. Reaction, however, 
is the most delusive of iridescent fan-^ 
[ 185 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

tasies; we can no more turn back the 
tide of time than King Canute could 
command the waves of the German 
ocean. Whoever has cared for children 
must have wished, again and again, that 
the perplexities of their inevitable ma- 
turity might be solved by miraculously 
reviving the guilelessness of their in- 
fancy. The laws of nature forbid the 
miracle. If anything like childhood ever 
come to them again, it can come only 
with the toothless decrepitude of se- 
nility. The past is forever past, stif- 
fened into its changeless certainty; the 
future must inexorably be something 
else — better, w^e often dare to hope, 
worse, we are sometimes compelled to 
fear. We can do no more than guide 
its progress through uncertainty, as well 
as may be, with what faithful courage 
and common-sense may happily be ours. 
If reaction thus be hopeless — if it be 
[ 186] 



OF EDUCATION 

only another dream of enchanting folly 
— the true question before us grows 
a little more clear. Our present state 
of education is chaotic, if you will, and 
charged with some such explosive men- 
ace as always lurks in chaos. At best, 
it is a surging mass of novelty — of new 
men and of new methods alike — not yet 
reduced to semblance of order. Here 
lies the revolutionary danger of it. A 
moment's thought will reassure us. No 
such danger is a final certainty. If we 
can bring order, or anything like order, 
out of the chaos, things may still go 
tolerably well; and what for a while 
seemed our blinding superstition may 
justify itself once more as a saving 
faith. By way of starting ourselves 
towards this reassuring end, we can 
begin to see, we had best try to define 
education; or rather, instead of troub- 
ling ourselves about precisely what we 
[ 187] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

conceive it to be, we may conveniently 
consider what seems, on the whole, the 
use of it. 

Such a question, no doubt, might be 
endlessly disputed. Yet the longer the 
dispute should last the more likely it 
would be to tend towards agreement 
with an opinion concerning the func- 
tion of education on which we have 
touched already. Generalizing the mat- 
ter as broadly as we can, and thereby 
avoiding distraction by importunate, 
yet not necessarily important, features 
of detail, we can hardly fail to admit 
that among the indisputable possibilities 
of education is the fact that it can surely 
and efficiently make the experience of 
the past available for the present and 
for the future. No single lifetime ever 
taught anybody much ; but nobody ever 
ended his life without knowing a little 
more than he knew when he began it. 
[ 188] 



OF EDUCATION 

Thus, from eldest time, human experi- 
ence has slowly accumulated. We can 
fancifully imagine remote epochs when 
throughout the nebulous course of in- 
numerable repetitory generations, the 
elementary intelligence of our half-brute 
ances'fcors was unable to learn more 
than what actually happened to them 
taught it, or to show infancy much 
more than how to chip flints and to 
twang bow-strings. We can hardly 
conceive of such ancestors as really and 
truly human without the persistent pa- 
rental attributes of tongue and rod. 
The tongue told what had been done, 
and what had happened, and what, in 
view of this experience, ought to be 
done now, — blunderingly enough, of 
course, and with all manner of misap- 
prehension, but with the elementary 
vigour of assured conviction. The rod 
enforced the lesson, civil and religious 
[189] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

alike, bringing artificial and temporary 
grief to those who, without it, might 
have come to grief incurable. In some 
such rude way, we may imagine, the 
process which we now call education 
had its forgotten origin. Ancestral 
man, the while, probably enjoyed juve- 
nile certainty that whatever is so is so, 
once for all. By this time, however, 
man has ripened in knowledge, and we 
may hope in wisdom, until he finds him- 
self possessed of a great deal more ex- 
perience than he knows what to do with. 
History, literature and art have their 
lessons for him, despairingly unlearned 
a good deal of the time; so has the 
growing certainty of science, unriddling 
the heavens or driving the machinery 
which is beginning to make the forces of 
nature not our masters but our servants. 
The problem of how to manage our 
crude, colossal wealth of experience has 
[ 190] 



OF EDUCATION 

insensibly become tremendous. When 
we earnestly set ourselves to the task of 
solving it, we are inevitably brought 
back to the prime importance of what 
we may call the arts of record — the de- 
vices by which men have managed to 
make clear to others than have had a 
given experience something as near as 
may be to understanding of what that 
experience has been. 

In their elementary form, no doubt, 
these arts of record have so long been 
generally mastered that we are ac- 
customed nowadays to regard them as 
comparatively trivial. At least, when 
we are concerned with the higher learn- 
ing or study, aspiration or accomplish- 
ment, we assume the fruits of primary 
teaching as data, much as we assume 
eyes and ears and hands, nerves or 
brains. Yet if any miracle should ruth- 
lessly sweep from existence the arts of 
[191] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

reading, of writing and of arithmetic, 
human imagination seems powerless to 
conceive the nowhere where our de- 
scendants would be blindly groping. 
Yankee dialect displayed Yankee com- 
mon-sense when it insisted on the sanc- 
tity of the "three R's." The little red 
school-house, grotesquely trivial though 
its aspect be, is deservedly a reverend 
symbol of what must be kept secure if 
civilization itself is to be kept alive. 

Now the very diffusion of these fun- 
damental, elementary arts proves two 
simple facts about them. One is that 
every-day human beings, down to al- 
most the lowest state of intelligence 
fairly to be described as human, can 
learn how to read, and to write and to 
cipher; the other is that the means by 
which human beings can learn these 
accomplishments is the following of di- 
rections and instructions given them by 
[ 192 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

teachers. Teaching unquestionably va- 
ries in efficiency, even when concerned 
with nothing more recondite than prim- 
ers. In some cases, for example, which 
begin to seem less frequent than they 
used to be, children learn to read very 
quickly; and if they learn at once quickly 
and accurately in considerable numbers 
under a given instructor or a given sys- 
tem of teaching, we may rationally and 
sensibly infer that their teaching has 
been satisfactory. In other cases, such 
as those of recent methods which treat 
the order of the alphabet as arbitrary, 
they learn slowly and carelessly ; if such 
dilatory inexactitude prove general any- 
where, one needs no extraordinary good 
sense to surmise that the teaching in- 
volved is not so good as it ought to be. 
Such variations, however, do not much 
affect the broad lines of the case. That 
good teaching, or even tolerable teach- 
[193] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ing, can result in mastery of the three 
elementary arts is proved by the fact 
that illiteracy nowadays is, on the 
whole, an easily curable social disease. 
It cannot generally be cured, to be sure, 
by enticingly agreeable devices. At- 
tempts to sugar the pill of learning, 
when they leave its efficacy unharmed, 
are usually found only to enhance its 
bitterness by their transparent pre- 
tence of appeal to appetite. A general 
pleasantry some years ago asserted 
that an experimental primer, entitled 
''Reading Without Tears," had given 
rise to more infantile weeping and 
wailing than any other book which 
ever came to the light of print. Admit- 
ting the tears, however, as a regrettable 
lesson of unbroken experience — except, 
perhaps, in cases as infrequent and as 
monstrous as those of infant piety in 
old-fashioned books of devotional ex- 
[ 194 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

hortation, — no one would for a mo- 
ment question that the fundamental 
processes of reading, writing and ci- 
phering can be taught and can be 
learned. There can be no question, 
furthermore, that people must learn to 
read, to write and to cipher fairly well 
before they can proceed intelligently to 
learn much else, by any more elaborate 
process than word of mouth. 

Far as these elementary arts may 
seem from the arts and the sciences held 
higher, they have in common with the 
highest one regular feature. In all alike 
the process of education — of teaching 
which secures learning — clearly makes 
the experience of the past available for 
the present and for the future. Lan- 
guage itself is only the desiccated con- 
sent of experience. It is so long since 
instinctive agreement began to make 
arbitrary sounds stand for definite con- 
[ 195] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ceptions — so long, too, since the arbi- 
trary strokes of what is now the pen 
came conventionally to represent these 
arbitrary sounds, and so long since 
numerals slipped off of people's fingers 
on to slates or parchments — that we 
have generally forgotten what countless 
blundering experiments must have been 
made before that agreement began to 
dawn on which alone the meaning of 
these symbols rests. It is getting to be 
so long since not only the learned but 
the simple, too, could use these symbols 
generally and freely that we forget as 
well what a vast body of experiment 
must have underlain the conduct of 
teachers as well as of their pupils in the 
past. When you candidly consider the 
matter, however, you can hardly help 
admitting that the only thing which has 
given sounds their meaning, lines and 
curves their significance, numerals their 
[ 196] 



OF EDUCATION 

potencies, and teaching what efficacy it 
has come to possess, is experience, 
whether forgotten or recorded. Re- 
membered, recorded, collected, and half 
digested, this experience is now availa- 
ble for every human being in all civil- 
ized countries; and, we confidently 
hope that it will stay so as long as there 
is anybody left to need it. 

Elementary and vexatiously general- 
ized though all this lucubration may 
have seemed, it has now brought us, 
I think, to a point where we can pret- 
ty clearly discern some considerations 
which may help us to answer the ques- 
tion chiefly before us. We are trying 
to ascertain how something Hke man- 
ageable order may be brought out of 
the educational confusion which now 
perplexes many good men and women. 
The very simplicity of the matter in the 
elementary and generalized form on 
[ 197] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

which we have been dwelling makes 
the discussion easy; and the princi- 
ples there at work seem much the same 
as those at work throughout the whole 
range of education everywhere. We 
shall do well, nevertheless, to linger over 
elementary matters a little longer. The 
general assumption that by submission 
to teaching, it is practically possible 
for pupils to learn the arts of reading, 
of writing, and of arithmetic, we have 
seen to be confirmed by general, pro- 
longed and repeated experience. The 
teaching of these arts, we may now re- 
mind ourselves, is commonly done at 
schools of which one sure function is 
to make the experience of the past 
available for the future. Though among 
ourselves, at the present day, there are 
many different kinds of schools, the 
greater number are supported by un- 
grudged taxation of the public, for an 
[ 198 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

acknowledged public benefit. iVmong 
ourselves, too, at any rate, the respon- 
sible conduct of these public schools — 
the supervision of the teaching practiced 
in them, and of the discipline main- 
tained there — is usually in charge of a 
school committee. School committees 
are not necessarily expert bodies. Gen- 
erally speaking, however, they may be 
assumed to possess ordinary common- 
sense; and common-sense, applied to 
the elementary phases of education un- 
der their oiBScial direction, is usually 
enough to make them reasonably effi- 
cient. 

When a sensible school committee — 
if we may permit ourselves, for the 
moment, to suppose it free from po- 
litical, religious or other disturbing 
bias — is concerned with such phases 
of education as those at which we 
have been glancing, the question be- 
[ 199] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

fore it is simply whether the arts 
of reading, of writing and of arith- 
metic are taught reasonably well. Do 
pupils at the schools in its charge get hold 
of simple tools without undue delay? 
Do they learn to read, I mean, to write 
and to cipher in what, under the circum- 
stances, may be held a reasonably short 
time ? When they have thus got hold 
of their tools, do they use them swiftly, 
firmly and accurately? The question 
is one of hard fact, not of fads or 
fancier. Take writing, for example. 
The important thing is that a child 
shall learn to use his pen as fast as his 
hand will run, and almost as uncon- 
sciously as he uses his tongue; and 
that he shall use his pen, the while, 
with such precision that no one who 
has to read what he has written can 
have any doubt as to which letter or 
which word is which. Apart from this, 
[ 200 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

writing is a matter of taste. Whether 
his letters stand upright, or lean to 
right or to left, whether they be round 
or square, fat or thin, makes no real 
difference. Even the ugliness of shaded 
and flourishing penmanship, admired 
in days when professional penmen still 
sharpened their own quills, is objec- 
tionable only on aesthetic grounds, or 
because it distracts attention from the 
significance of letters to the ingenuity of 
their form. A school committee which 
should find that the pupils at a school 
under its control can answer questions in 
unaffected and legible handwriting may 
rest content that the teaching of writing 
at that school is eflficient, and may con- 
scientiously pass on to something else. 
A school committee, on the other hand, 
which should find that pupils at a 
school in its charge cannot generally 
write freely and legibly at ten years of 
[201 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

age, may be sure that something is the 
matter — perhaps with the children, but 
more probably with their teaching. 
Then comes the perplexing question of 
what shall be done about it — a question 
with which we will not quite yet con- 
cern ourselves. The one clear thing 
is that a sensible committee should let 
satisfactory work alone, interfering only 
with work which is not so good as might 
reasonably be expected. 

We may now pass on to higher forms 
of education; for the principles so evi- 
dent in this elementary case seem to me 
precisely and completely those which 
should govern the directors of learning 
and of education from top to bottom. 
A school committee, the trustees of a 
university, or a ministry of education 
doubtless have many various and dif- 
ferent functions and duties. In com- 
mon, the while, they cannot help hav- 
[ 202 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

ing the function at which we have been 
glancing in what seems its simplest form. 
One thing — I had almost said the one 
thing — which education can surely do, 
is to make the experience of the past 
available for the future. This may in- 
volve nothing more complicated than 
the accurate reproduction, by children, 
of lines and letters which consent, be- 
come immemorial, has made significant 
of ideas — such lines and letters as I am 
at this moment tracing on the page 
which will go from my desk to the 
printer. It may, on the other hand, 
lead us to regions where any such sim- 
plicity seems as remote as the garbless 
joys of Eden. Instruction may concern 
the facts of history, for example, or the 
principles of science, or the concepts of 
philosophy, or the conduct of life. It may 
linger anywhere far within the limits of 
unquestioning acceptance; but it may 
[ 203 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ramble at its pleasure so far as many of 
us can see, beyond any sensible verge of 
boldest conjecture. No matter. The 
one essential question before directors 
of education anywhere, everywhere, in 
all its phases, remains substantially the 
same. Does the education under their 
control assure the continued possession 
of the experience of the past ? and does 
it assure this in such manner as shall 
make past experience available for the 
present, and for the future ? 

Simple to this point, the matter now 
begins to grow rather more perplexing. 
Elementary education has the good 
fortune to be at once demonstrably 
practicable and subject to undisputed 
tests. You can teach a child to read 
or to write, with no excessive expense 
of time. When he has once learned to 
read or write you can find out how well 
he has learned by the simple process of 
[ 204 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

putting a printed page before him, or 
of asking him to reproduce, on a blank 
sheet, the contents of any printed page 
which you may choose to read aloud 
to him. There is no dispute as to what 
lines stand for what letters, what let- 
ters for what words, what words for 
what accepted concepts or ideas. The 
moment you turn to anything higher, on 
the other hand, — to history, for exam- 
ple — ^you will find yourself in a posi- 
tion of less security. What has really 
happened in the past is not always 
indisputable. The outlines even of 
chronology, the most certain basis of 
historic fact, sometimes grow tremu- 
lous. When we come to discussing the 
significance of what has happened 
to men, to nations, to epochs, we shall 
generally find it confused not only by 
wide divergences of interpretation, but 
also by incessant intrusions of distract- 
[ 205 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ing legend. It is only a little while 
since highly accomplished people made 
no bones of marvels, so long as the 
marvels happened long enough ago. 
Wise men have lived and died happy 
without suspicion that no wolf of any- 
thing but bronze ever suckled Romulus 
and Remus; rational folks would have 
had us assured, on the other hand, 
that Romulus himself is a mere figment 
of full-grown Roman fancy ; and arch- 
aeologists, on the Palatine, show us 
crumbling foundations of walls which 
they pretend to have belonged to his 
primitive city, destined to become first 
imperial and then eternal. Matters of 
more authentic record prove little more 
stable. Was Csesar, for example, the 
almost divine creator and restorer of 
world-order whose name justly descend- 
ed to all the grand or shadowy sover- 
eigns of the Holy Roman Empire ? or 
r 206 1 



OF EDUCATION 

was he only a shrewd seizer of oppor- 
tunity in an age when political forces 
surged hopelessly beyond all human 
control ? He has lately been portrayed 
as little more than a canny special 
pleader, who happened, by the mere 
accident of his epoch, to make his pleas 
and to take his magnificent chances 
at an instant which has imposed the 
legend of his superhuman greatness 
on the imagination of all posterity. Is 
Mommsen his prophet, or Ferrero his 
apologist ? 

Something similar is true, to go no 
further, with the arts of expression as 
distinguished from the arts of record, 
even at their highest. There have 
been thousands, there are and there 
will be thousands to assure us that the 
fine arts — architecture, sculpture and 
painting, music and poetry — need for 
their nurture the care of those treas- 
[ 207 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

uries of orthodox tradition which have 
long usurped the Platonic name of 
academies. Thousands more main- 
tain, as thousands have maintained 
throughout the past and thousands 
will maintain throughoui: the future, 
that academies, — and the museums, 
the conservatories, the universities 
which support and feed them, — are no 
better than burial vaults for what 
was once vital beauty; that if expres- 
sion enduringly true and beautiful is 
ever to gladden earth again, it must 
spring wild from without the walls of 
these splendid and sweet charnel houses. 
Already we are come to a point where 
some gleams of order may shine through 
the bewilderment of the confusion into 
which w^e have taken a plunge. Valid 
accumulation of past experience, we 
have implicitly reminded ourselves, 
must rest on something as near to 
[ 208 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

assured fact as in any range of human 
inquiry may prove within human re- 
sources. Such assured fact we may find, 
for example, in the unshaken records of 
authentic history, amid the nebulous 
swirls of distorting tradition through 
which intervening centuries have come 
to see them. We may find it, too, in 
the means by which light and shade on 
the flat surface of a canvas may be 
made to mimic the round solidity of 
human form. We may find it in those 
intervals between musical notes which 
shall conventionally convey to us the 
impressions of melody or noise, har- 
mony or discord. Education, through- 
out its vagrant extent, must everywhere 
rest on some such ascertained fact; 
otherwise it cannot securely put us in 
possession of the experience of the 
past, to be used for the benefit of the 
present and of the future, 
r 209 1 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

We have implicitly reminded our- 
selves, the while, that human beings 
may avail themselves of past experience 
for future benefit in two distinct ways. 
The type of the first we may find in any 
of the fine arts ; the purpose of it is the 
production of some piece of work 
which, if worthy, shall enrich or de- 
light us, or shall delight and enrich us at 
once. Whether we are speaking a for- 
eign language, or practising medicine, 
or designing a cathedral or composing 
a symphony, the test of our doing is 
the thing we do. The type of the second 
phase of human energy w^hich we are 
considering, or, if you prefer, of the 
other kind of education, may be found 
in the study of history. This should 
stimulate us not to material production, 
but to immaterial — not to constructive 
rules of composition, but to wisdom in 
the widest possible sense, and perhaps 
[ 210 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

to rules of conduct. There are two 
distinct ends or purposes of education. 
So much grows clear. All education 
must be based on knowledge of fact, 
but the uses to which this knowledge is 
put may legitimately differ. Our use 
of it, on the one hand, may be techni- 
cal; on the other hand, our use of it 
may bt; philosophic. 

When any one in charge of any phase 
of modern education, high or low, — 
selectman, trustee, college president, 
whatever you will, — is perplexed he 
may perhaps find that these simple con- 
siderations afford him a suggestion for 
guidance. To make the experience 
of the past available for the future 
is the chief end and object of the 
efforts he is trying to direct. At the 
present time, this process, which used 
to be traditional until it almost suc- 
cumbed to the paralysis of tradition, is 
[211 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

generally experimental. The test he 
should apply to it, in any stage or as- 
pect, seems accordingly nothing but 
the test which he would apply to any 
experiment in other than educational 
fields. He should judge it, not by its 
popularity, but only by its results. If 
technical results are what he desires, the 
question should be not whether pupils 
or the public would like to learn this 
or that accomplishment, but whether 
they actually do learn it; and though 
philosophy in its full and inspiriting 
scope, be a more elusive matter, the 
question stays the same when the na- 
ture of a study is philosophic. A pupil 
is technically well educated if, after due 
diligence, he can do skilfully what he 
has laboriously been taught to do; he 
is well educated philosophically if, 
after honest work, he can think vigor- 
ously, alertly and accurately about the 
[ 212 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

matter which his study has kept before 
his attention. Incidentally, in this 
event, he will often have learned how to 
think soundly about other matters, too. 
If he prove wanting, technically or phil- 
osophically, as the case may be, he is 
ill educated; something is the matter; 
and the question of what is the matter 
should naturally occur before any one 
tries to prescribe a cure. Another thing 
grows fairly clear. Any one who finds 
himself charged with the responsibility 
of directing any phase of education 
should relentlessly demand palpable 
results from those who are actually con- 
ducting it — from the teachers who them- 
selves are responsible to him. Whether 
their energies be directed towards tech- 
nical ends or towards philosophic, he 
should equally require that these ends 
be at least approximately attained. 
Suppose, for example, that the mat- 
[ 213 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ter in hand be technical — that the prob- 
lem be how to teach a foreign language, 
French, or German, to pupils whose 
native tongue is English. The test of 
the teaching is plain. It is not whether 
the pupils recite well, whether their 
marks are good, or whether they have 
managed to pass any number of written 
examinations. It is first and foremost 
whether they learn, in no excessive 
time, to read the language currently — 
to pick up at random a newspaper, a 
magazine, a book, or a poem written 
and printed in these originally unfa- 
miliar terms, and master its contents 
with something like the ease with 
which they master similar matter writ- 
ten and printed in the terms of their 
own tongue. Next, it is whether they 
can express themselves intelligibly, de- 
cently and with some approach to 
fluency in writing the strange language 
r 214 1 



OF EDUCATION 

which they have studied ; whether they 
can write letters in French or in Ger- 
man, and perhaps more formal com- 
positions, too. Finally, it is whether 
their ears and their tongues are toler- 
ably trained as well; it is whether they 
can understand affable foreigners who 
speak to them, and respond to such 
kindly advances in terms which the for- 
eigners can recognize; it is whether, in 
turn, they can ask questions in French 
or German and understand the an- 
swers, and so proceed until the lan- 
guage, once a collocation of unmeaning 
sounds, has become a vehicle of human 
intercourse. If they can do any or all of 
these things, the time and energy de- 
voted to their study has not been ex- 
travagantly expended . Unless they can, 
so much of it as has not been incident- 
ally useful in cultivating their powers 
of voluntary attention, has been cruelly 

[215 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

wasted. Elementary though this ex- 
ample be, it may serve as a type of all 
technical education whatsoever. 

Or suppose that the question con- 
cern such a phase of education as we 
have called philosophic. The study of 
history or of literature will serve us for 
example here. Though the possible 
test of its results be less exact, it is not 
needfully much less certain. Again 
such matters as recitations, or grades, 
or examinations — incidental phases of 
the means through which modern edu- 
cation generally proceeds toward what 
ends it has in view, — are of no great 
importance. As was the case with 
technical matters, the first question 
is one of general accuracy. If a pu- 
pil who has studied history knows 
what has happened to a nation or to an 
epoch, somewhat as he knows about 
things which have happened to himself 
[216] 



OF EDUCATION 

or tc his family, his study has begun to 
grow fruitful ; if he is in possession only 
of unrelated, half-grasped facts, it has 
been fruitless. 

The very suggestion that unrelated 
facts are not history leads us to a 
second result which we may fairly ex- 
pect from any such phase of education 
as we have called philosophic. To 
greater or less degree philosophic study 
should awaken and develop the critical 
faculty. The simplest possible example 
of this is appreciation of the compara- 
tive importance of events, of men, of 
regions, of works, of epochs. Such ap- 
preciation is far from the rule in school 
books. Some years ago, for example, I 
chanced to pick up such a work which 
a country shop-keeper, who could offer 
me no more stimulating literary diver- 
sion for a rainy mountain day, informed 
me was then used in the public schools 
[ 217 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

of Vermont villages. Its subject was the 
history of the state. Its opening sen- 
tence, as I remember the words — I 
have had the misfortune to lose the 
volume — was "Vermont is a noble 
State." Further on it gave a page or 
more, to an account of how a young 
woman of the eighteenth century, stray- 
ing into the woods, came very near de- 
struction by a bear, frightened away or 
shot in the nick of time by her brave 
Green Mountain boy of a brother. And 
so on. This instance of eccentric histor- 
ical perspective is, perhaps, extreme ; but 
it differs only in degree from that Amer- 
ican edition of Stopford Brooke's Primer 
of English Literature in which among 
many questions concerning the "Ameri- 
can Supplement," printed at the end 
for the guidance of American teachers 
and pupils, is a request that the unhap- 
py young person to whom it may be 
[ 218 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

orally addressed shall specify the princi- 
pal writings of Jared Sparks. That 
good man was a sound historian, in his 
day and generation. We hope he is in 
heaven; otherwise he may toss restless 
in his grave, if intimation of what the 
hacks have thus done with the fruit of 
his labours should filter through the 
Cambridge turf. But after all, glim- 
mering consciousness of what he accom- 
plished while still in the sunshine should 
bring him peace again. Beyond others 
of his time he helped to show everybody 
why Washington was truly the hero of 
the American Revolution, and Franklin 
its philosopher. He meddled mischiev- 
ously with their English, to be sure, 
unwilling that great men should be de- 
tected in descents to petty phrase; but 
he for one did his best not to disturb the 
big facts and values Which is another 
way of setting forth how the critical 
[219] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

faculty, normally roused to work by 
any kind of philosophic study, may well 
begin. 

A third result may fairly be expected 
from the kind of education which we 
have called philosophic — not so defi- 
nite as knowledge of fact, or even as 
sense of values, nor yet so general as 
either, but nevertheless attainable. This 
is that among any considerable number 
of pupils you shall find some who real- 
ize for themselves, eagerly or seriously 
as the case may be, that the mechanical 
processes of education, from infant 
school to doctor's thesis, are lifeless 
things and spiritually useless unless 
they make you ready to do more and 
more, so long as your strength shall 
last. Take, for example here, the 
study of literature. Names and dates 
and titles you may have stored in your 
head and in your note-books; influ- 
[ 220 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

ences, too, and sources, disputed read- 
ings and illuminating glosses. If the 
study do not make you love your poetry 
better than before, though, — if it do not 
stimulate you to read as you could 
hardly have read without it, if it fail to 
make the beauty which the past has 
enshrined in deathless words more 
marvellous and enchanting than you 
had been able to understand at first, — 
then it has stopped short of its ideal 
end. It may have helped train your 
power of voluntary attention, and thus 
not have been all wasted. Even so, it 
will not have enlarged, enriched, and 
sweetened life. Rather there will be no 
life in it at all; and if there be things 
more repellently lifeless than ranges of 
lifeless learning, the Lord knows what 
they are. 

If life be in your philosophic study, 
on the other hand, it may well prove 
[ 221 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

the most enduring vital force in all your 
experience. Even technical study may 
sometimes tend to stimulate imagination 
and thus to impel people toward produc- 
tion which would hardly have come 
into existence without it. When it 
reaches this stage of efficacy, however, 
even though the subjects of its imag- 
inative activity and the objects of its 
invention be severely, prosaically prac- 
tical, — even though they be only such 
machines or devices as one used to 
think of when people still talked about 
Yankee notions, — technical education 
or study breaks through its own par- 
ticular limits. So long as the study of 
a language, for example, is confined to 
the mastery thereof, it stays technical. 
When at last you begin to think in the 
language you have studied, to make 
puns in it, to turn phrases in it which 
shall express shades of meaning not 
[ 222 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

otherwise so well set forth, and so to 
reason in it according to what degree 
of wisdom may be yours, your techni- 
cal study merges into a philosophical. 
With the kind of study which we have 
generally called philosophic, such stim- 
ulus of imagination is more instantly 
normal. The ideal fruit of the study 
of history, I mean, should be reasoning 
about history ; and if all went well here 
below, the ideal end of the study of lit- 
erature would be not only the enjoy- 
ment of poetry, but the making of it. 
Here, though, we stray from hard fact in- 
to pleasant fancy. Your historical think- 
ers and your creative poets, we must 
sadly admit, are infrequent throughout 
the whole course of human record — 
your real ones, I mean, your enduring 
ones, with whom posterity must reckon. 
The best of them emerge, more and 
more distinct from what were once their 
[ 223 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

earthly surroundings, — mostly matters 
contentedly forgotten by posterity, — by 
virtue of a marvellous quality for which 
we have no better name than genius. 
Gleams of it are common enough, — 
sparks, rather, which, almost before they 
begin to glow, are smothered by the 
blasts or the dust storms of life. It is 
only when irrepressibly ardent that 
genius will burn through the winds and 
the ashes — sometimes faint, sometimes 
blazing. Your smouldering spark of 
genius, too, is more often quenched 
than kindled by any process of educa- 
tion as yet devised by man. It seems 
probable, indeed, that genius must al- 
ways be essentially vagrant, that nothing 
less than an independence sure to seem 
like irregularity, — nothing but bold dis- 
dain of all cramping and benumbing 
rules, — can resolutely command the 
scope needful for its evident display. 
[ 224 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

Yet genius as well as dulness must in- 
evitably be subjected to processes of 
education. Very clearly, the kind of 
philosophic education which least stifles 
it may well be sought for as ideally the 
most fruitful. No system of education 
can produce genius, and without genius 
no creative work is possible. A stupid 
system of education, nevertheless, may 
so dishearten genius that what might 
have been originality shall become dog- 
gedly conventional ; and so sink into the 
flat ooze of repetitive insignificance. 

Any system of education which should 
stimulate original creation would be 
happy. To demand such a result from 
any system of education, however, 
would be far from just. No one, be- 
sides, can deny the danger which gen- 
erally attends too eager efforts to make 
education creatively effective — the dan- 
ger, namely, of encouraging stupidity to 
[225 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

believe itself originality, and thus of 
burdening the world with new accumu- 
lations of commonplaces not quaint 
enough to be amusing. On the whole, 
then, we may best leave genius to the 
power which makes it and infuses it 
fantastically into human nature. Our 
precise question now — if precise, in- 
deed, be not too portentous a word for 
any such considerations as ours — con- 
cerns the results which any authority 
in control of education may fairly ex- 
pect from the teaching under its con- 
trol. Creative work we may place 
among the things to be hoped for but 
not sensibly to be demanded. 

Certain palpable results, all the same, 
not only may be demanded from teach- 
ing, but ought to be. Whether the 
phase of education at any moment un- 
der consideration be technical or philo- 
sophic, sound instruction ought to give 
[ 226 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

your average pupil a thoroughly firm 
grasp of the facts with which his study 
has been concerned. The best test of 
such accuracy is definite; in technical 
matters, it is skilful workmanship; in 
philosophical matters it is sound think- 
ing. Such results as these, I believe, at 
least within the mercifully reasonable 
limits which are sanctioned everywhere 
by common-sense, educational authority 
may fairly demand from any system un- 
der its control. Conscientious educa- 
tional authority ought to demand them 
relentlessly. What is more, if it fail, in 
due time, to get something fairly near 
them, it should relentlessly proceed to 
find out, if it can, the reason why. 

Off-hand, people seem disposed to as- 
sume that there can be only one reason 
why the teaching of any subject should 
prove unfruitful. Nowadays, at all 
events, everybody appears to believe 
[ 227 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

that anything whatever can be mastered 
by means of some formal educational 
process. If any given phase of educa- 
tion be unsatisfactory, the obvious and 
simple way to account for the trouble 
is to assert that the subject in question 
is ill taught. For some reason or other 
the teachers are inefficient; either they 
are incompetent, or their methods — a 
favourite word in educational discus- 
sion at the present time — are mistaken. 
Change men or methods or both, as the 
case may be, and the fogs will roll 
away. Alluring though this simple 
view of the matter must always be, it 
does not seem, in the full white light of 
experience, quite to cover the situation. 
Any one much concerned with modern 
education, at least in America, must 
sometimes have had the dismay of ob- 
serving that such changes, confidently 
expected to be for the better, have led 
[ 228 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

straight to confusion worse confounded. 
Under these circumstances, the cou- 
rageous impulse is to try again. More 
than seldom such new trials have led 
only to new bewilderments ; until at last 
there may fairly arise a doubt as to 
whether the subjects concerned are 
really subjects which anybody as yet on 
earth knows how to teach. Now, to my 
thinking, the reason why a given system 
of education proves, on the whole, fruit- 
less, may be found in this second con- 
sideration almost as probably as in the 
first. It must generally be found, how- 
ever, in one or the other. The reason, 
in brief, is either that the subjects con- 
cerned are ill taught or else that ex- 
periment has proved them at present 
unsuitable for systematic teaching. 

The teaching of modern languages 
at our American schools and colleges 
may be taken as an illustration of what 
[ 229 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

we now have in mind. It seems clear, 
as we have already reminded ourselves, 
that the chief object of this teaching is 
technical. After a reasonable amount 
of study, a pupil ought to be able to 
read, to write, and perhaps to speak the 
language he has been resolutely attack- 
ing, and to do so with some degree of 
fluency. At this moment, a profusion 
of oflSicial catalogues will assure you, 
some knowledge of French and of 
German is regularly demanded as a 
requisite for admission to many of our 
colleges; and if French and German 
are not presented for admission to these 
seminaries of learning, they must be 
studied there during one of the under- 
graduate years. Entrance examination 
papers in them are duly provided. For 
students who have not passed such ex- 
aminations, courses of various grades, 
elementary and advanced, are duly of- 
[ 230 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

fered. Somehow or other, students man- 
age either to pass the entrance examina- 
tions, or else to get adequate grades in 
the courses which are supposed to be 
more than equivalent. The upshot is 
that, in most instances, an American 
bachelor of arts is officially asserted, by 
his degree, to be able, at the very least, 
to read easy French or German at sight. 
Now take the matter as it must surely 
present itself to any American professor, 
whether his teachings be confined to a 
colleo-e, or extend to one of the numer- 
ous graduate schools which are be- 
ginning so widely to demonstrate our 
cheerful conviction that the more you 
can prolong the formal process of edu- 
cation, the more you may reasonably 
expect from it. The professor, we will 
suppose, is directly concerned with 
something else than French or German 
— with classics or history, philosophy or 
[ 231 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

science. He suggests that a student 
would do well to read some authority 
on the matter who happens to have 
written in German or in French. Nine 
times out of ten he will be met, on the 
part of students, with looks of amaze- 
ment as blank as if he had referred 
them to texts in Russian or in Hebrew, 
in Old Irish or in the even less familiar 
terms of Eliot's Indian Bible. They 
have studied French and German, of 
course; they have duly passed the ex- 
aminations which have been set them 
in these alluring subjects. They can no 
more read them, the while, than they 
could read the hieroglyphics of Yucatan, 
or the inscriptions on Etruscan sarco- 
phagi. Sometimes your professor is 
more lucky, and stumbles on a student 
to whom French or German is not an 
impenetrable mystery. In such event, 
he is pretty sure to discover that the fine 
[ 232 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

art of reading these modern tongues has 
been acquired not in American schools 
or colleges, but during a few months 
of travel abroad. A colleague of mine 
with whom I was lately discussing this 
matter — he was professor in an emi- 
nently respectable Eastern university — 
mentioned an incident which, I fear, 
most of us would find commonplace. 
He had proposed that a student should 
consult some book in German or 
French; and had been answered that 
the boy could not read the language in 
question. ''^Vhy not.^" he asked 
"Haven't you studied it.^" — "Certainly, 
I have," the youth answered; "but 
I've only taken three courses in it here." 
Which meant, I am given to under- 
stand, three class-meetings a week 
during three full academic years. The 
authorities responsible for any teaching 
which results like this are plainly con- 
[233] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

fronted with the question of what 
shall be done about it. As matters 
stand, the teaching is practically use- 
less. Can the subject be taught better ? 
or must we, for the moment, give up 
the teaching of it altogether ? 

Or take the matter of the classics, as 
they used to be taught thirty-odd years 
ago. Latin and Greek may be re- 
garded in some aspects as technical 
subjects, like the modern languages 
which our foregoing considerations will 
show not yet quite satisfactorily to have 
supplanted them. In one technical 
matter — that of grammatical detail — 
they are the most drearily efficient gym- 
nastic trainers of voluntary attention as 
yet discovered by European man. In 
another aspect they may better be re- 
garded as philosophic subjects. So far 
as they may properly be described as 
"the humanities", revealing to us the 
[ 234 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

primitive experiences of European cul- 
ture, they are wholly so. When I was 
a boy, one had to study them every 
day for a good many years. At school 
and at college, for example, I had ten 
years of Latin and six or eight of Greek. 
My own experience was about that of 
my contemporaries. I acquired, to 
be sure, some detailed knowledge of 
grammar, and the incidental training 
of my voluntary attention was not to 
be lamented. After all those years of 
faithful work with texts and diction- 
aries and grammars, however, I was 
unable to read a single page of either 
language currently; and what scrappy 
knowledge of either literature I had 
acquired had been derived either from 
talks with the stimulating teachers on 
whom I had occasionally chanced to 
fall, or from reading books in English 
about the texts of which I could make 
[ 235 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

neither head nor tail in Greek or in 
Latin. Something was evidently wrong. 
I stili feel almost justified for having re- 
sentfully spoken against classical teach- 
ing, at different times ever since. My 
classical colleagues assure me now that 
things go better. It is welcome news 
— not yet widely confirmed, neverthe- 
less, by conclusive evidence of re- 
viving enthusiasm for classical culture 
among undergraduates. 

Or take, if you prefer, a matter with 
which a great part of my own profes- 
sional work has been concerned — the 
teaching of English Composition. Un- 
til a generation ago, little attention was 
given to this fine art at American col- 
leges, and American students wrote 
badly. During the past thirty years, 
a great deal of attention has been given 
to it. The catalogue of almost any 
American college will show you an 
li 236 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

offering of instruction in composition 
which would seem to assure at least 
two results: Every-day pupils who 
have been submitted to this instruc- 
tion ought to express themselves in 
writing with some such habitual and 
unpretentious skill as that which the 
graduates of a Conservatory of Music 
exhibit in the use of their instruments ; 
exceptional pupils, who have enjoyed 
such advantages as are now offered, 
ought to become skilful creative artists 
— poets, if they truly be poets, of refresh- 
ingly confident technical power. That 
English Composition has been taught, 
far and wide, with intelligence, with 
earnestness, and with enthusiasm, must 
be clear to any one who has followed 
the course of this admirable educa- 
tional experiment. That it has enjoyed 
unstintingly generous support from the 
authorities who have supplied the 
[ 237 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

means for it is among the inspiriting 
certainties of the case. That it has 
been welcomed rather than discouraged 
by teachers concerned with subjects 
which might well have found it an 
intrusive rival is equally and happily 
true. Sunshine never glowed warmer. 
It is time now to look for the conse- 
quent crop, they begin to tell us. The 
crop is not all that might have been 
happily expected. There are observers, 
indeed, who seem reluctantly coming 
to believe that the results attained, in the 
case of every-day students and of excep- 
tional alike, have not begun to justify 
the expense of the experiment, in 
money, in time, or in energy. It is only 
fair to add that these observers are still 
at variance with most people who have 
given much attention to the matter. 
Authorities and teachers still believe the 
enthusiasm of the original effort more 
[ 238 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

nearly justified than the doubts of its 
critics. The doubters, the while, will 
not rest quiet. For all our efforts, they 
protest, they cannot see either that 
every-day people write better than 
they used to, or that instruction in 
English Composition has anywhere 
fostered anything like a recognizable 
school of literature. If not, after thirty 
years of honest experiment, they warn 
us that the time is at hand for de- 
ciding whether the trouble is that so 
far English Composition has been ill 
taught, or that it is, at present, among 
the subjects which cannot be satis- 
factorily taught at all. 

That there are such subjects would 
have seemed to me beyond dispute — 
a matter of plain common-sense — if it 
were not implicitly contradicted all 
about us. We may neglect such cob- 
webs for the untutored as the occa- 
[ 239 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

sional Colleges of Oratory or of Elo- 
cution where, after laborious and ex- 
pensive years, no one ever learned more 
than how to give blatant readings at sub- 
urban church festivals, or perhaps to 
open another such college in some re- 
gion still innocent of its impotence. 
We cannot neglect the solid founda- 
tions on which now and again bene- 
factors demand that we shall presently 
erect practical schools of journalism, 
of business, of diplomacy, or of what- 
ever else, without considering whether 
any such school can practically be made 
to work. We may well ponder on the 
extension of older schools which is now 
becoming so frequent. Plenty of edu- 
cational experts, for example, will as- 
sure you that if a two-years' course in 
a law school produced better lawyers 
than came to the light without it, a 
three-years' course must evidently pro- 
[ 240 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

duce practitioners half as good again. 
This experiment has been in operation 
long enough for some sort of rough 
test. If men who have taken their de- 
grees in law, for example, after a three- 
years' course — let us say between the 
years 1880 and 1895 — are obviously 
better lawyers than men who took their 
degrees after a two-years' course — in 
this instance, between 1865 and 1880, 
— the experiment is justified. If not, it 
is at best questionable. There is one 
sound reason, too, why it might be ques- 
tionable anyway: it deliberately keeps 
men a full year longer away from the 
finally moulding experience of practical 
responsibility. After all, there is no 
school like the world; as soon as any- 
one is old enough to risk the perils of it, 
some think, that is the best school for 
him to go to. Formal education is at 
the height of its usefulness, such critics 
[ 241 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

maintain, when it is helping the imma- 
ture towards confronting the problems 
of their maturity. No formal education, 
they insist, can ever be quite real; and 
actual life can never be anything else. 
Though schools can prepare for life by 
system and by mimicry, they cannot re- 
place the poignant truth that on what 
you do in life may turn human destinies ; 
and there are some matters, and proba- 
bly there always will be, which life will 
never relinquish, even in part, to any 
training less arduous than its own. 

The chances, however, are that when 
teaching proves so unsatisfactory as is 
now the case with that of foreign lan- 
guages in American schools, as has been 
the case there with that of the classics, 
or as is perhaps the case with that of 
English Composition, the trouble is not 
with the subject but with the manner 
in which it has been taught. This does 
\l 242 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

not by any means imply that it has not 
been taught honestly and even enthusi- 
astically. As a class, teachers, high and 
low, have the deep virtue of unfailing 
effort to do their best. That is one 
chief reason why authorities find them 
so hard to deal with. It is easy enough 
to sweep into the dust heap careless 
incompetence or pretentious nothing. 
It is very hard to convince yourself 
that human beings, whom you cannot 
help respecting, whom perhaps you 
have grown to care for, have been 
wasting the very blood of their hearts. 
Such life blood is going every day into 
those efforts to teach foreign languages 
in America which we have found, on the 
whole, futile. It went into the teach- 
ing of classics during all the days when 
classical studies seemed demonstrably 
a waste of time. It goes now into the 
brave experiments still making all about 
[ 243 ( 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

us to teach Americans how to write 
their native language. Yet while it 
exhausts the teachers from whom it is 
drawn, it does not redden the veins of 
the students to whom they generously 
strive to impart it. That modern teach- 
ing accomplishes far too little is clear. 
The question is what we can do 
towards making it effective. 

So we come to the somewhat simpler 
question of what sort of person an 
ideal teacher should be. First of all, 
I think, we shall agree that he should 
himself know something about the 
subject which he professes to teach; 
and this not only for the obvious reason 
that otherwise he can hardly make 
sure whether his pupils are learning 
it accurately or not, but also for the 
less generally recognized reason that the 
better he knows his subject the more 
likely he will be to impress his pupils 
[ 244 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

as, at least in this respect, their superior. 
This second reason has brought us al- 
most unawares to the trait in an ideal 
teacher which may fairly be held more 
important than any other — the power 
of making pupils feel that he is a better 
man than they. No human being can 
possibly be at his best everywhere : but 
every one knows that some seem to us 
stronger, wiser, abler than we; that 
others seem about our equals ; and that 
many, in comparison with our excellent 
selves, seem, on the whole, poor things. 
Now just so far as any teacher, through 
any fault or misfortune, presents him- 
self to pupils as in any respect a poor 
thing, he lacks one fundamental qual- 
ity on which thoroughly efficient teach- 
ing must be based. The old story of 
the raw teacher of a country school 
who begun his first day's work by 
thrashing the school bully, for refusing 
[ 245 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

to leave the room in the interests of 
order, is quite to the point here. So is 
the fact that the probably apocryphal 
anecdote was included, with a very 
rudimentary illustrative wood-cut, in 
an alleged biography — popular when I 
was a boy — of a Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court of the United States. 
This temporary teacher established the 
fact of his authority, before he tried se- 
riously to exert it ; from the moment he 
had the bully down, he was admitted to 
be a better man than any of the youths 
under his temporary control. He is 
believed to have taught efficiently, in 
consequence; and he had too much 
vigour in him to remain content with 
school-teaching all his life. 

Thus we come to a deep and persis- 
tent difficulty, sure more or less to per- 
plex authorities in search of effective 
teachers. An ideal teacher must have 
[ 246 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

something like first-rate vigour. A man 
with first-rate vigour will rarely be 
content to remain a teacher any longer 
than may be needful. The trouble goes 
so far as to have excited, from a friend 
of mine, the paradoxical opinion that 
no youth who desires to teach will ever 
be fit for the work. Only two kinds of 
teachers, this not very authoritative 
personage went on to propound, gen- 
erally turn out well. One of these 
groups consists of scholars, — of men 
who have a voracious appetite for learn- 
ing, who count the day ill-spent when 
they do not go to bed in possession 
of knowledge acquired since they woke 
up in the morning. Scholarship, alone 
and unaided, will not provide them with 
bread and butter; to keep themselves 
alive for the vigorous delights of it, 
they have to teach by the way. The 
vital power of their teaching, the while, 
[ 247 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

springs the untiring enthusiasm of their 
scholarship. Here is a superiority not 
to be gainsaid. The other group of 
efficient teachers my friend described by 
the less complimentary name of lame 
ducks. They are men who have had 
the native spirit to yearn for the expe- 
rience of measuring themselves, in the 
full struggle of active life, with fellows 
of their own size, or bigger; and who, 
for one or another reason — often from 
infirmity of health — have not quite 
managed to hold their own. They in- 
clude, he was cordially prepared to ad- 
mit, the fledglings, who consent to 
nestle for a year or two in schools be- 
fore they take flight to wider fields of 
activity — such characters as the Chief 
Justice who began work as a teacher by 
thrashing the school bully. The type 
of them, however, is to be found in the 
game fowl who has been brought down, 
[ 248 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

early or late, but who has not lost the 
spirit which made him eager to fly high 
and far among, and against, his equals. 
The metaphor grows confused, per- 
paps, but not the significance of it; in 
which significance lurks one reason 
why, on general principles, people are 
still impulsively disposed to prefer a 
man for a teacher to a woman. 

There lurks in it, as well, an evident 
reason why it is generally easier to find 
the right kind of women who are 
willing to teach than to find anything 
like equally impressive men. Among 
the assumptions now most frequent 
concerning the possibilities of education 
is the dogmatic assertion that teachers 
can be and should be professionally 
trained for their work. In some of our 
American states, I am informed, this 
opinion has resulted in statutes requir- 
ing that no one be employed in public 
[ 249 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

school teaching of certain grades who 
has not received a degree from some 
institution of the higher learning which 
maintains a chair of pedagogics — or 
whatever else the mystery in question 
may here or there be called. Normal 
schools, of which the only particular 
purpose is to teach teachers how to 
teach, besprinkle the continent. Grad- 
uate schools, — which are mostly nothing 
more than normal schools in rather thin 
academic disguise, pretending to train 
scholars, but really trying to get employ- 
ment for their own graduates as teach- 
ers, — enrich or encumber, as you will, 
pretty much all of our universities. The 
chief object of women's colleges, too, and 
of the general coeducational invasion of 
colleges not intended for women alone, 
seems to be little else than the equip- 
ment of female school-teachers with 
what look like dignified and significant 
[ 250 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

degrees. Now to go to a normal school 
or to a graduate school, you must have 
made up your mind beforehand that you 
shall devote your life to teaching. In 
a woman this decision involves rather 
an assertion of ambition than any sort 
of renunciation. In a man of full na- 
tive vigour, on the contrary, it com- 
monly involves renunciation of just the 
opportunities which would usually ex- 
cite his strongest hopes — the opportu- 
nities of wealth, of virile contest, of 
power, of influence among his equals. 
Someone has cruelly said, and yet with 
a trace of truth, that a youth who 
aspires to be a school-master proves 
himself thereby afraid to meet men 
of his own size. You can begin to 
see why normal schools and graduate 
schools — the nurseries of our profes- 
sional teachers — are coming to group 
themselves, in sundry observant minds, 
[251] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

with women's colleges, pure and sim- 
ple. The women there are so much 
more numerous than the men, and, I 
fear we must admit, so much more alert 
into the bargain, that the poor men — 
some of whom are admirable fellows, 
after all, — ^get to seem negligible. In 
point of fact, the schools themselves 
already treat them invidiously; you 
will commonly find them in the back 
seats of the lecture rooms. 

These various schools for the training 
of teachers are beginning, the while, to 
impose on educational authorities sys- 
tems of almost ritual initiation into the 
mystery of professional teaching. They 
seem, at least, to consider compliance 
with their forms a necessary prelimi- 
nary to any common-sense inquiry con- 
cerning the practical efficiency of a 
teacher or his work. If they go much 
further they will become patently mis- 
[ 252 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

chievous. Training we may admit to 
be probably a good thing for anybody — 
provided it be based on sound knowl- 
edge, wisely applied. Degrees, as certifi- 
cates of training, have undeniable "prima 
facie value. Yet all the training and 
all the degrees which ever made any 
American teacher's name imposing in a 
catalogue can do no more than estab- 
lish some slight presumption of practical 
capacity. A teacher who proves able to 
teach without them has no more vital 
need of them than of brown eyes or of 
golden hair; just as a teacher who, in 
spite of them, fails to teach well, is no 
better than if his name, or hers, had 
no array of letters to come trailing after 
it. You can see why some of us have 
little patience with those institutions of 
the higher learning which complacently 
boast that everybody in their faculties 
has secured the degree of Doctor of 
[ 253 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

Philosophy; or with instances where 
years of good teaching are counted for 
little against the fact that an accom- 
plished woman was never a happy col- 
lege girl. In these days of reviving 
privilege, there are few forms of privi- 
lege more insidious than that which 
thus tries to base on formal privilege 
the professional existence of the very 
people whose chief public usefulness is 
to combat the pretensions of privilege, 
high and low alike. 

What is more, there is a tendency 
throughout this process to make the 
training of teachers an end in itself, 
complete when the training is finished, 
except in so far as the trained teachers 
go on to train others. That eflScient 
teaching, if it do its duty, ought to 
make the experience of the past availa- 
ble for the future, seems to be quite for- 
gotten. Some of our leading scholars, 
[ 254 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

as the cant phrase runs, content them- 
selves, so nearly as observation can as- 
sure us, with attaching their pupils to 
their own learned persons. Thereupon 
they proceed to pump into these absorb- 
ent parasites exactly what they them- 
selves contain until, by mere force of 
inertia, the duly inflated new organ- 
isms breaks away — as nearly like the 
old as weak things can be like things 
inherently strong. The infirmities of 
human nature doubtless demand such 
practices or something like them. It 
is hard, though, to detect in their out- 
comes much more than such abortive 
uselessness as might attend efforts, on 
the part of earnest human beings, to 
reproduce themselves by the seemingly 
convenient process of fissiparous prop- 
agation. Beginning somewhere, they 
end, at best, nowhere else. 

Somewhere else than amid this thick- 
[ 255 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

ening confusion, we must seek the light 
which we are now trying to discern. 
We have lingered long enough over the 
perplexities which must surround edu- 
cational authorities who find that the 
education in their charge is not sub- 
stantially effective — that it does not 
practically make the experience of the 
past available for the future. The first 
thing for them to suspect, we have 
agreed, is that they need better teach- 
ing — not, as a rule, teachers of more 
edifying moral worth, but teachers who 
shall manage to make pupils learn 
more and learn better than pupils learn 
now. Ideal teaching should direct 
work which can show as its result a 
strengthened grasp of fact, and an 
ability to use such firmly grasped fact 
for ends either philosophic or technical, 
as the case may be. Any teaching 
which falls short of these ends should 
[ 25Q ] 



OF EDUCATION 

be sharply scrutinized. It may be that 
the trouble lies no deeper than in meth- 
ods ; it may be, that the men or women 
themselves whatever their personal vir- 
tues, are incompetent; it may be that 
the task they have undertaken is beyond 
the present power of any teaching what- 
ever. 

Here, for example, we may recall 
what we brought to mind concerning 
the study of foreign languages in Amer- 
ica at the present day. The general 
failure which has resulted from much 
honest effort to teach them might well 
give rise to opinion that they are among 
the hapless subjects experimentally 
shown to be still beyond the range of 
practical instruction To go no further, 
however, any one who has observed the 
results of the teaching of English in the 
common schools of France or of Ger- 
many, of Holland or of Sweden, can 
[ 257 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

hardly fail to agree that in many cases 
English has been taught admirably. 
If foreigners can teach our language 
efficiently we ought, on general princi- 
ples, to teach theirs at least tolerably. 
The trouble, in this instance, seems to 
be not that a foreign language cannot be 
taught but that as yet American teach- 
ers do not know how to teach one. Per- 
haps our present teachers can discover 
better methods of teaching. If not, we 
must find better teachers. The thing, 
if worth doing, can demonstrably be 
done. 

Or consider the case of the classics 
in the last generation, on which we 
also touched. People can be taught, 
in no excessive time, to read the Latin 
language, and probably the Greek, too. 
If you are beset with any doubts on this 
point you have only to remember that 
for something like a thousand years 
[ 258 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

after Latin ceased to be a normally liv- 
ing language, it was used as a vehicle of 
instruction at every university through- 
out Europe. What is more, the classics 
can be read as literature; otherwise 
there would have been no such thing 
as the Renaissance, and bewigged 
members of Parliament could never 
have quoted Horace. The trouble 
grows pretty clear. Old-fashioned clas- 
sical teaching complacently assumed 
that its object was to make everybody 
who was submitted to it a thorough 
technical scholar; whereas what we 
really demand from classical teaching 
nowadays is not a world full of learned 
professors, but all the culture which the 
classics can possibly stimulate. In the 
Greek days and the Roman, the primal 
civilization of Europe gave to all pos- 
terity ideals and forms of thought 
which we now recognize as at once 
[ 259 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

purely European and inevitably ances- 
tral to ourselves. The more of us 
who can learn to know what classical 
literature means, the better for every° 
body ; but we may generally leave to the 
grammarians the names by which the 
poets, or more often their commentators, 
happened to call this or that mood or 
tense or case. As human beings, we 
are concerned only with the human 
significance of case or tense or mood 
when used in lines which have lived to 
be immortal vehicles of human thought 
and emotion. Your professor must 
know all about them, of course ; so 
must your student who is preparing 
for a professorship; but you or I need 
only read, and enjoy, and think. The 
trouble here was with the ideal; and 
that ideal, our classical friends assure 
us, they are changing. 

With the other instance at which we 
[ 260 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

happened to glance — that of English 
Composition — the case may perhaps 
be held different, or at least, less cer- 
tain. Very likely, to be sure, the trouble 
still lies with the teachers or with their 
teaching. Certainly the whole admi- 
rable experiment of the past thirty 
years has inevitably been only experi- 
mental. Comparative failure, even 
though admitted, need not bring dis- 
couragement. What is more, there can 
be no doubt that other languages than 
English can be taught by means of 
direct instruction in the use of them. 
Not to dwell on the teaching of Latin 
composition which for centuries gave 
something like mastery of this classic 
language to every educated man in 
Europe, and which gives some control 
of it even now to every duly trained 
ecclesiastic of the ancestral church, we 
cannot fail to see that our nearest 
[261] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

European neighbours, the French, can 
be taught to write their own tongue with 
admirably idiomatic skill and precision. 
Though French books have their faults, 
their faults are rarely faults of style. 
Again, there seems no valid reason 
why teachers of English should not 
accomplish the kind of thing which has 
evidently been accomplished by teachers 
of French. 

Just here, however, some are begin- 
ning to suspect, may lie a demonstra- 
bly insuperable difficulty. Idiomatic 
Latin, when you come to consider its 
history, proves to have been based, from 
the beginning, on severe rhetorical study. 
Idiomatic French has, on the whole, 
been based on some such study for at 
least three hundred years. No one 
who has not been trained in rhetoric, 
as we generally call the subject here- 
abouts and nowadays, — no one at least 
[ 262 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

who has not profoundly felt the influ- 
ence of rhetorical teaching, — can pos- 
sibly write French or Latin idiomati- 
cally; for rhetoric, directly studied, is at 
the core of both idioms. With English, 
the case is historically different. Wliat 
we now call idiomatic English is the 
style used by writers of the English 
language from the time of Queen 
Elizabeth to the present day. Broadly 
speaking, not one of these writers ever 
gave much attention to the direct study 
of English Composition. Almost all of 
them had elementary training in Latin, 
and in many cases their training went 
far beyond the elementary stage. Al- 
most all of them were familiar with the 
superb ritual of the Church of Eng- 
land. Hardly any of them was half so 
ignorant as almost everybody here- 
abouts is getting to be of the English 
Bible. And almost without exception, 
[263] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

whenever they wrote English, they 
were far more concerned with what 
they were writing about than with any 
question of how they turned their 
phrases. EngUsh, indeed, has been 
called the least consciously rhetorical 
language in all literary history. Thus 
there begins to appear a plain historical 
reason why, when one gets beyond 
grammatical details and elementary 
correctness, English may perhaps prove 
more stubborn to rhetoricians than any 
other language with which they have 
tried to deal. For the very essence of 
it historically seems this spirit of rhet- 
orical vagrancy; and the very idiom of 
it seems bound up in the fact that it has 
never yet been masterfully acquired by 
means of direct study. You can teach 
pupils to use English words, beyond 
doubt; you can teach them to put to- 
gether sentences and paragraphs with 
[ 264 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

meticulous care. Whether you can 
teach them to write idiomatic English 
by any system more direct than the un- 
consciously free one through which the 
masterpieces of idiomatic English have 
come into their centuries of being re- 
mains to be experimentally proved. 
Sundry good people, as we have seen, 
at present incline to think that experi- 
ment has gone far to prove the achieve- 
ment beyond human power. 

Any such conclusion would still be 
premature. All which anybody can as 
yet assert is that, in the opinion of oc- 
casional observers, no teachers and no 
methods have as yet justified, by irre- 
futable results, the still general faith 
that if you honestly try to teach youths 
how to write English, they will learn 
to write it with idiomatic freedom. 
The task is worth trying a good deal 
longer. If the end can be achieved, 
[ ^^5 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

every disheartening experiment will 
have been justified by the ultimate re- 
sult. And even if the end be never 
achieved, not a bit of the experiment 
need be regretted. For it will have 
proved, at last, that the only way to 
write English is to make sure of what 
you mean and then to express it, as 
well as you can, in the terras and the 
rhythms which unconfined English 
usage has made wildly idiomatic. One 
can always comment, in passing, on 
this turn of phrase or on that. There 
was never a page written which might 
not have been written better. But 
English style, like happiness, may finally 
turn out to be most nearly attainable 
only by those who never directly seek it. 
This problem, of English Composi- 
tion at the present time, seems to me as 
happy as can be found to indicate how 
educational authority may wisely deal 
[ 266 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

with the chaos — the disorder, if you 
prefer, or the anarchy — which must 
sometimes make modern education 
seem hopeless. Such teaching as we 
have had hitherto, we may candidly 
admit, has failed and still fails satisfac- 
torily to serve the purpose for which 
it has been established and maintained. 
Very well. We must try new experi- 
ments, honestly and generously. We 
must see what new methods will do, or 
new teachers. If, after due time, they, 
too, come to little, the wiser course is 
to be honest with everybody. Here is 
another Philosopher's Stone, another 
universal solvent, another machine of 
perpetual motion, another elixir of life. 
The lives which were spent in search of 
these fly away s were not wasted. There 
is vastly less dissipation of human ener- 
gy now because of what may sometimes 
seem the tragic futilities of the past. 
[ 267 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

And how much may always be accom- 
pKshed by due concentration of human 
energy we may learn from the whole 
history of that past which lies open 
for those to study who will. 

Wise concentration, we may agree, is 
what the education of our time plainly 
demands. Where education can most 
wisely be concentrated must still be 
learned by experiment. The enthusias- 
tic diffusion of the moment has broken 
the old bonds. So much the better; 
for they would never have been broken 
if they had not been almost worn out. 
There is now growing about us, how- 
ever, an impotence of diffusion as mis- 
chievous as any which ever came from 
the paralysis of hypnotized concentra- 
tion. The diffusion which was once 
our strength has become so inflated 
that now it is rather our weakness. 
We must set our wits to work over 
[ 268 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

our consequent problem, We must 
ascertain what can be done and what 
cannot, what can be done well and 
what best, what is really useful when 
pupils emerge from schools into life, 
and what useless. If English Com- 
position can be well taught, let it be 
taught far and wide. If not, let us 
reluctantly give up pretending that we 
know how to teach this evidently prac- 
ticable art. If the classics can be made 
once more the stimulants of culture, 
give them all the honour they ever had ; 
but do not give them a bit of honour 
which they do not incontestably deserve. 
If foreign languages can be mastered in 
our schools, let them be taught there, 
more than ever; if not, do not console 
yourself by the mere fact that the names 
of them burden programmes. If three 
years in law schools make better law- 
yers than two, let us insist on three; if 
[ 269 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

not, let us candidly admit that two are 
enough. If Trade Schools make handi- 
work more skilful, let us have Trade 
Schools. If Schools of Business, or of 
Journalism or of Diplomacy provide us 
with better diplomats and journalists 
and men of affairs, so much the better 
for the whole world. If not, the sooner 
you close the doors of them, the wiser 
the future will find you. If Normal 
Schools and Graduate Schools and all 
manner of degrees produce teachers 
who can teach their pupils better than 
pupils were taught in old times, let us 
welcome more of them and more. If 
not, let us make them understand that 
they must prove their claim to our re- 
spect before w^e shall submit much 
longer to their growing demands for 
privilege. Some of these phases of edu- 
cation will surely prove their worth. 
Almost as surely, some of them will 
[ 270 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

show themselves pretty nearly useless. 
The educational authority which shall 
most wisely concentrate its effort in the 
future will be that which soonest and 
most candidly distinguishes between 
achievements which are within its power 
and achievements which are not. 

Baffling though such generalization 
as ours may well seem, it has, perhaps, 
brought us to a point where we may 
summarize our thoughts of education 
more helpfully than we could have 
done without it. The education of the 
past, we have agreed, had the great 
virtue of training and strengthening 
voluntary attention. Here its general 
efficacy came to an end. It neither 
put people in firm possession of any 
wide range of fact nor yet helped them 
much to use what facts they possessed 
for either technical or philosophic pur- 
poses. At best, we may agree that, 
[ 271 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

both technically and philosophically, it 
came far short of ideal results. Con- 
fronted with the conditions of modernity, 
the world grew into new and pressing 
need of technical training and of philo- 
sophic too, better than the old education 
could afford it. The need was insistent. 
It stays so. On the technical power 
of any race or nation must ultimately 
depend its material strength; on its 
philosophic power, in the widest sense, 
must depend its spiritual strength, and 
on its spiritual strength to no small 
degree must rest its political. So the 
education of the future must accom- 
plish more than was ever accomplished 
by that of the past. It must train 
voluntary attention as vigorously as 
ever — reviving the relaxed muscularity 
of elder days. It must submit itself, the 
while, to a new and fiercer test. It 
must prove the validity of its methods 
[ 272 ] 



OF EDUCATION 

by either technical or philosophic 
achievement — and at its best, we 
hope, by achievement where technical 
power and philosophic are fused and 
intermingled. 

So it behooves educational authority 
gravely to consider what can be brought 
to pass by formal educational process, 
and what must be reserved for the 
more inexorable teaching of actual life. 
Once assured of this, even momentarily, 
authority can concentrate its efforts on 
those matters which, for the while, it 
can handle best. There is no conceiv- 
able field of its activity where its ulti- 
mate work will be much else than the 
making of past experience available for 
the future. If this task be confronted 
earnestly, though, — if the education of 
the future have the courage to recognize 
its limits, — we can hardly fail, in the 
end, to work the marvel which super- 
[ 273 ] 



THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES 

stition has fancied that even the chaotic 
education of the passing moment might 
work by the mere fact of its innocently 
pretentious existence. For the true les- 
son of experience is never a lesson of 
destruction. Learned faithfully, and 
taught conscientiously, it can still do 
more than all the force and all the 
outcries to check the tyranny of privi- 
lege and to avert the folly of revolu- 
tion. At least, so things must still 
seem to such common-sense as lingers 
among men of letters. 



[ 274 ] 



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